Thirty years ago, an article criticizing the Carter administration’s foreign policy appeared in these pages under the title “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Its author was Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a professor of political science at Georgetown University. “Dictatorships and Double Standards” went on to become one of the most controversial and influential articles published in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century.

Kirkpatrick’s central argument was very much focused on the singular events of the year 1979, one of the most difficult in American history, and therefore would seem to have limited application to the very different world order to be found in 2009. Nonetheless, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” remains a potent and devastating critique of how American progressives think about U.S. power and foreign policy. And the approach it condemns—the way in which the Carter administration viewed the world and conducted American policy—is worryingly similar to the approach of the Obama administration today.

Certain policies pursued by the Carter administration, ostensibly in the name of American principles and interests, Kirkpatrick argued, were in fact undermining those interests and leading to America’s international isolation and a loss of power and authority. “In the thirty-odd months since the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as President,” she began,

there has occurred a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas.

During the Carter years, revolutionary forces were on the march in the Middle East and Latin America, and those forces were hostile to the United States and its interests. This was so even though Carter and his people had tried to make it very clear that they shared many of the same convictions of those revolutionary forces about the problematic nature of the governments against which they were fighting. “The U.S.,” Kirkpatrick wrote with the slap-in-the-face directness that has kept the article fresh decades after its publication, “has never tried so hard and failed so utterly to make and keep friends in the Third World.”

She made particular note of the cases of Nicaragua and Iran, both of which were in revolutionary upheaval. Successive American governments had enjoyed good relations with the monarchical government of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the authoritarian regime dominated by the Somoza family. Both had opened their countries to modernization, and that modernization had yielded gradual economic and political progress—but both regimes were autocratic and prepared to govern harshly in order to maintain their hold on power.

As oppositional forces gained ground against the Shah and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the administration went out of its way to criticize the repressive measures taken by the regimes and to use moral suasion to force them into concessions. The American attitude fed fuel to fire, and both regimes fell in 1979. And in both cases, successor regimes—the clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—turned out to be not only hostile to the U.S. but also far more repressive of their own citizens than their predecessors had been.

That the Carter administration was much harder on friendly autocrats (often of the Right) than it was on leftist dictatorships, Kirkpatrick argued, reflected a double standard—a bias toward those who claimed to be progressives—that strengthened the Soviet Union, left the United States alienated from its friends, and undermined broad national goals about protecting democracy and human rights. It was the administration’s desire to allow the supposed “will of the people” to prevail over the mild autocrats facing domestic opposition that had guided the interventions in Iran and Nicaragua. What actually happened in both cases, however, was that the U.S. had “actively collaborated in the replacement of moderate autocrats friendly to American interests with less friendly autocrats of extremist persuasion.”

Moreover, the administration had only selectively supported the popular will. In Communist-led countries, Carter had failed to encourage democratic change or to support change that brought rightist regimes to power. Thus, for example, while immediately recognizing the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua, Carter had refused to recognize the elected rightist government in Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

“Not only are there ideology and a double standard at work here,” Kirkpatrick wrote, but “the ideology neither fits nor explains reality.” This was the nub of the problem: progressive revolutionaries not only had goals that were antithetical to those of the United States, but they were also allied with, and in many cases subservient to, the Soviet Union’s, America’s great adversary. And yet that was less of a problem for the Carter administration than one might expect from this historical vantage point.

Reaching a new agreement with the Soviets on nuclear weaponry, the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), was the central preoccupation of the administration. In his memoirs, Carter’s secretary of state Cyrus Vance devotes almost the entire first chapter (titled “Our Legacy”) to SALT II: “When cooperation could enhance our security, as in limiting the nuclear arms race, it should be pursued without attempting to link it to other issues,” he wrote.

By “other issues,” Vance meant human rights—specifically, the crushing of human rights everywhere the Soviet Union sought to extend its influence, and within its own borders as well. Vance and the administration believed that human-rights considerations could be sacrificed for the larger national interest. The trouble was that the Soviets were insisting on linking arms control to human rights by using the SALT negotiations as leverage to deflect American pressure. By allowing the Soviet Union to control the diplomatic agenda, then, the administration ended up very much linking SALT to “other issues.”

And yet the administration did have a human-rights agenda. Indeed, Carter fancied himself then, and poses even now, as a promoter of human rights worldwide. The surprising element of Carter’s approach was that it focused almost entirely on criticizing the conduct of regimes considered right of center. In one sense, Vance’s approach paralleled Kirkpatrick’s. Both were ready to live with a measure of human-rights abuse. Kirkpatrick thought the United States could foster gradual progress in friendly authoritarian countries in exchange for diplomatic and military support against the Communists; Vance was ready to avert his eyes from human–rights abuses in Communist countries in order to achieve arms reduction and conciliation.

But in a more important sense, the approaches were exactly opposite. What Carter believed to be in the national interest translated into appeasing the Soviet Union and standing on principle only when it came to friendly governments. Kirkpatrick believed the national interest entailed supporting friendly authoritarian regimes as part of the crucial effort to stem the tide of Communism. For among Communism’s offenses was not merely its opposition to the United States but its systematic and ideologically inspired denial of personal, economic, and political liberty.

Some unjust regimes were worse, far worse, than others. Kirkpatrick argued that totalitarianregimes that tended to be products of leftist revolutionaries were more repressive than traditional authoritarian governments, because the former, by their very nature, attempted to control every aspect of society. Authoritarian regimes exercised control over politics but tended to leave in place

existing allocation of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.

Communist regimes, by contrast,

create refugees by the million because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will “fit” better in a foreign country than in their native land.

As a consequence, Kirkpatrick argued that when a rightist regime was faced with leftist opposition, as was the case in Nicaragua under Carter, the rightist regime merited support. If the leftist regimes replaced the existing governments, they argued, those governments would become worse violators of human rights. Thus, the junta of Augusto Pinochet should be supported as long as the opposition in Chile was immoderate and leftist. As long as the extreme leftist, violent FMLN was opposing the government in El Salvador, the United States should support the military government in place. This approach might have been called the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine.”

What is interesting, in retrospect, is the way in which it was both pursued and amended by the Reagan administration, in which Kirkpatrick ended up serving famously as ambassador to the United Nations for three years.

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In 1985, Charles Krauthammer coined the term “Reagan Doctrine” to describe the set of policies Reagan’s administration was pursuing to provide “overt and unabashed American support for anti-Communist revolutions.” The Reagan Doctrine was highly specific: it related strictly to countries in which there were anti-Communist insurgencies fighting against existing Communist governments that received support from the Soviet Union. Only six countries across the globe fit the bill; primary among them were Afghanistan and Nicaragua, one invaded and taken over by the Soviet Union, the other a Soviet client state.

The Reagan Doctrine concerned itself with supporting insurgencies against Soviet-backed regimes; the Kirkpatrick Doctrine advocated supporting existing governments against leftist insurgencies. Even so, Kirkpatrick did not give friendly regimes a free pass. She only wanted to treat them more like friends because, well, they were friends, and they were not as repressive as Marxist-Leninist states.

But in the course of the Reagan years, a third scenario presented itself: authoritarian regimes in which there was a growing democratic opposition. And here is where the evolutionary promise of “Dictatorships and Double Standards” proved prophetic (though it must be said that Kirkpatrick herself did not quite see this at the time). For in El Salvador and Chile, precisely the sorts of changes Kirkpatrick discussed in her article—shifts toward greater political openness, with the existing regime slowly and painfully conceding its gradual delegitimation in the face of free elections and demands for more liberty—actually took place. The Reagan administration withdrew its support for military and dictatorial regimes when genuine democratic opposition sprung to replace them.

Thus it can be said that Kirkpatrick helped develop a transformational foreign policy that ended up promoting human rights and democracy as well as anti-Communism. The view of the Reagan administration was that there are good governments, and there are bad governments; but even among the bad, there was a way to distinguish between better and worse alternatives. When such distinctions were made, change proved far easier to effect. The story of the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be one in which friendly authoritarian regimes were supported, and that support was used as leverage to help move the nations they dominated toward democratic change. From El Salvador to South Korea, from Colombia to the Philippines, authoritarian regimes gave way to freer and more representative governments without violent upheaval.

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What lessons can be drawn from “Dictatorships and Double Standards” today, 30 years after its appearance and three years after Kirkpatrick’s death at the age of 80?

Carter righteously spoke of human rights and the will of the people when it came to the disturbing behavior of certain allies. But when the Soviet Union threatened the peace and flouted the will of the people across four continents, the administration backed down on human-rights criticism in order to achieve conciliation. Similarly, in June, Barack Obama—in the midst, we now understand, of an effort to convince Iran’s rulers to trade their enriched bomb-ready uranium for peaceful nuclear material—was rendered voiceless when Iran’s citizenry rose up against the results of a rigged election intended to strengthen the power of a fundamentalist autarchy.

Obama has insisted on pursuing a misconceived notion of the national interest by refusing to support Iranian democrats, instead holding out for the remote possibility that Ahmadinejad might be willing to talk about his nuclear program. President Carter did the same when he refrained from criticizing the Soviet Union on human rights because he wanted to achieve arms reductions. What Carter failed to realize was that the Soviet Union could never guarantee peace and stability as long as it was a totalitarian regime. The same might easily be said of Iran’s mullahcracy.

Muting criticisms of human-rights violations in an undemocratic government can make sense—as it made sense in the 1980s—when there is no genuine democratic opposition to the existing government and when we have a serious strategic interest in seeing that government survive. But in Iran, the election protests have made clear that there exists a viable, democratic opposition in the country that merits our support, and we certainly have no interest in seeing the Ahmadinejad government survive.

Obama has gone Carter one better—or worse—in his behavior toward India, a democratic country that has been moving steadily into the American orbit. Not only did Obama fail to send his secretary of State to visit the world’s second most populous nation during her first trip to Asia, he has demanded that India stop testing and developing nuclear weapons—despite its security concerns in relation to neighboring, adversarial, nuclear Pakistan. And yet Obama is perfectly willing to have civilized conversations about proliferation with the belligerent dictatorial rulers of Iran and North Korea. And, of course, he has withdrawn the promise of missile-shield protection from Poland and the Czech Republic because he wishes to cultivate the regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

While Obama is striving for consistency—non-proliferation for everyone—in effect he is promoting a double standard whereby he demands nuclear reduction or disarmament from friends and allies and will not confront nuclear armament by our adversaries. Here the distinction between good and bad governments is turned on its head.

Perhaps there is no better example of Obama’s problematic approach than his administration’s treatment of Honduras. When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted last summer, Obama immediately called the action illegal and insisted that Zelaya be returned to power. The administration refuses to talk to the interim government of Honduras, despite mounting evidence that the removal from power was constitutional and that Zelaya himself had precipitated it by attempting to extend his presidential term through an illegal maneuver.

Honduras is still a democracy: elections have already been set, and Zelaya’s interim successor is not even a contender. But even if the coup had been illegal and undemocratic, why would Obama negotiate with dictators in Iran and North Korea but not with one in an allied country? Obama seems to regard the friendships the United States has struck with nations that share our ideological convictions as geopolitical liabilities.

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The disastrous state of American foreign policy under Jimmy Carter was neatly encapsulated in Kirkpatrick’s blunt opening: “The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects.” But worse was yet to come. Kirkpatrick did not know that, only a week after Commentary’s November 1979 issue hit the newsstands, the U.S. embassy in Tehran would be raided and 52 of its employees taken hostage—nor could she have imagined that the hostage crisis would last 444 days. The year would come to a close with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We are not even a year into Barack Obama’s term, but given what we have seen of it so far, we have reason to fear that the “Dictatorships and Double Standards” of our time will see its way into print more quickly than Kirkpatrick’s, which appeared in the 33rd month of Carter’s ignominious single term.

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