Just Politics: Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of Great Powers

Introduction: Human Rights and Foreign Policy

Introduction Human Rights and Foreign Policy The conventional wisdom in international relations is that human rights matter little, if at all, in the foreign policy of great powers, especially when that policy involves strategic endeavors like the war on terror. U.S. behavior since 9/11 seems to reflect this belief. In addition to its own abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Washington appears to be overtly endorsing the inhumanity of partner regimes in countries ranging from Kazakhstan and Pakistan to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These relationships are underwritten by a series of military and economic assistance commitments by which the United States has provided billions of dollars in aid. Under the strategic guise of fighting terror, the leading liberal great power in the international system appears to be acting anything but liberal. World affairs, in essence, have returned to politics as usual after a brief respite following the Cold War. Human rights are a natural casualty. Whether or not this is a positive outcome is a subject of longstanding debate. Some say that democratic states, in particular, should press inhumane regimes, even allies, to liberalize and respect human rights. Others want to jettison human rights from foreign policy altogether, since they detract from important security concerns . The debate is not limited to policymakers, either. It stands at the heart of academic deliberations about what matters more in driving international politics—material factors and the national interest or ideas and identity. This book takes a definitive stand in these debates. More specifically, I show that while there may be some truth to the conventional wisdom on human rights, by and large it is wrong. Rather than play a marginal role, humanitarian norms are often at the heart of the foreign policy of great powers, especially in liberal democratic states. In fact, humanitarian considerations led the two greatest democratic powers in history—nineteenthcentury Great Britain and the postwar United States—to terminate core [1] security commitments to a host of important strategic partners. In the case of Britain, informal empire commitments, through which London pledged to protect the hegemony of allies in regions of great geostrategic importance , were critical to British power in the nineteenth century.1 Yet Britain ended pledges like these to the Ottoman Empire and Portugal in the 1870s and 1880s. As for the United States, Washington ended numerous military and economic assistance pledges like those at the center of the war on terror amidst the insecurity of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. U.S. commitments to partners such as Turkey, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, and many others were terminated. Many international relations scholars, especially realists, would expect this behavior to occur only when partners become less strategically valuable . Yet in the above cases—and many others like them—the United States and Britain unilaterally ended commitments not because partners became enemies or lost their value due to geostrategic changes. Key decisionmakers in Washington and London believed that their actions did or would damage perceived strategic objectives. Yet they acted on humanitarian impulses all the same. The British cabinet, for instance, panicked as its humanitarian-inspired restraint in the Ottoman case allowed Russian troops to come within nine miles of Constantinople, threatening access to India, its imperial gem.2 Henry Kissinger privately worried about dominoes falling across Latin America in the event that Chile or Peru became a communist state, arguing that such occurrences could affect the vitality of the NATO alliance.3 Various U.S. leaders, including President Ronald Reagan , feared that sanctions against South Africa would end America’s access to several vital strategic minerals and compromise sea lanes for Middle East oil.4 Finally, the termination of security assistance to Cuba (1958) and Nicaragua (1978) for humanitarian reasons arguably contributed to the rise of the Castro and Sandinista regimes, respectively, creating costly security problems for Washington in the last three decades of the Cold War.5 In hindsight, some of these threat perceptions may appear exaggerated. But at the time, policymakers were quite serious about them and nevertheless took what they saw as strategically self-destructive steps for humanitarian reasons. How do we explain this type of punitive action against strategic partners ? Why and when do humanitarian norms lead democracies to terminate or preserve strategic commitments? These are the main empirical questions addressed in this book. I define a strategic democratic commitment as a promised course of action, communicated via treaties, executive agreements with legislative Introduction [2] [18...