Copyright by Gregory Krauss 2007 - The University of Texas at Austin

Rights, Carter reiterated that U.S. human rights policy was not a “decoration” but the
actual “soul of our foreign policy.” 22 Lars Schoultz writes that President Carter’s
statements for the first time gave human rights “an unparalleled prominence in
foreign policy decision making.” 23
Carter nevertheless often let other concerns trump human rights. Economic
interests, for example, persuaded him to appear at a signing ceremony for the Panama
Canal treaty with dictators Pinochet of Chiles and Jorge Videla of Argentina. 24 As
under the Nixon and Ford administrations, Congress continued to pressure the
Executive on human rights. Sometimes Carter himself was scrutinized, but Congress
also questioned whether the State Department’s ingrained culture was inconsistent
with a strong human rights policy. In an essay published in 1979, Sen. Daniel P.
Moynahan complained about resistance to a meaningful human right policy from “the
career officers in the State Department who make up the permanent government....” 25
Perhaps the real test of the durability of human rights in U.S. foreign policy
came at the outset of the Reagan administration. As a candidate, Reagan had solicited
foreign policy advice from Jeane Kirkpatrick, a critic of the Carter human rights
policy best known for the argument that the U.S. ought to adopt a more permissive
stance towards authoritarian regimes, or friendly right-wing dictatorships, as opposed
to totalitarian or Communist regimes. 26 In his first days in office, Reagan continued to
signal an end to Carter’s focus on human rights. 27 His nominee to lead the human
rights bureau was Ernest Lefever, who had publicly advocated eliminating all human
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