Human rights and U.S. foreign policy

Abstract

T Carter Administration has given human rights issues high priority, in American foreign policy. During the past two and a half years, the United States has taken the leading role in the international financial institutions in voting against loans to human rights violators and has restructured its bilateral aid programme to Latin America so as to reward nations with good human rights records and punish those with poor records. U.S. security assistance has been eliminated or reduced to countries where there is no perceived security interest. However, the President has found that the inevitable tension between idealism and realism in foreign policy means that considerations other than human rights are repeatedly given priority. For example, the Carter Administration generally has not linked levels of military and economic aid to human rights with respect to those countries considered important to American security interests, such as South Korea and the Philippines. Critics have inferred from this that President Carter's human rights policy is concentrated on strategically and economically inconsequential countries. As one writer noted: The Carter Administration runs the risk of dividing the world into two categories: countries unimportant enough to be hectored about human rights and countries important enough to get away with murder.