Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse

Abstract

Joe Renouard's Human Rights in American Foreign Policy has two goals: (1) to provide a survey of U.S. human rights policies during the period from the Vietnam War to the end of the Cold War; and (2) to examine the tensions among traditional political, power, security, and economic interests and concerns for human rights. Renouard believes that policy makers’ goal should be to find the proper balance between national interests and humanitarian concerns, and that human rights policy “exemplifies the classic struggle between the realist tradition in foreign affairs … and the idealist tradition” (p. 6). Renouard challenges much of the excellent work on human rights and American foreign policy done in the last decade, such as Kathryn Sikkink's Mixed Signals (2004), Clair Apodaca's Understanding U.S. Human Rights Policy (2006), Sarah B. Snyder's Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War (2011), William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere (2013), and Barbara J. Keys's Reclaiming American Virtue (2014), seeing it as wrongly critical of American policy. He claims that these scholars see American human rights policy as defined by “inaction, hypocrisy, and double standards,” with the federal government “failing to go far enough to protect human rights …; [it is] a defensible position for an activist, but rather presumptuous for a scholar of diplomacy” (p. 13). He further argues that one will find hypocrisy “if one believes that consistency is a realistic goal. In fact, consistency is an impossible standard” (ibid.).