"Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy: Retrospect and Prospect."

As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, "The United States was founded on the proclamation of 'unalienable' rights, and human rights ever since have had a peculiar resonance in the American tradition." But the American fondness for human rights rhetoric has presented two fundamental problems in foreign policy. As first a reluctant great power and then a more willing superpower, the United States has faced the traditional conflict between commitment to human values and exercise of power for other interests. Equally importantly in an interdependent and nonhegemonic world, the United States has painfully discovered that the American and international versions of human rights are not the same. This article traces the workings of these twin dialectics (rights rhetoric and national interests, and rights rhetoric and community standards) from 1945 to the present in order to suggest that the United States, despite its dominant power, has not been the major shaper of community standards or international regimes on human rights; the United States in its bilateral diplomacy is still struggling to locate precisely human rights on its foreign policy agenda; the Congress, while it still does not codetermine human rights in foreign policy, is ignored and by-passed only at peril for an administration. Ultimately this article suggests that some painful political socialization is in store for the United States when it deals with human rights in foreign policy, especially since human rights in its many and complex forms is here to stay on both the U.S. and global agendas.