Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era

In his remarks, John Shattuck argued that two great "forces" have driven the world in the years after the Cold War. The "forces of integration" include economic globalization and increasingly interlinked economies that stemmed from the "triumph of markets" after the collapse of Soviet communism. Such forces are relatively positive when they help boost living standards and bring down regimes such as apartheid South Africa, he said.

However, Shattuck pointed out that at the same time the world was coming together, it was also falling apart due to the "forces of disintegration." By 1995, he said, some three million people had been killed around the world in countries and regions where ethnic conflict and failed states were the norm. Civilians now make up a much higher percentage of wartime casualties, he noted, and the surge in terrorism offers further proof of disintegrating tendencies.

Shattuck said that U.S. foreign policy has been heavily influenced by such forces of disintegration despite policymakers’ widespread attention to business and economic interests, which are generally pursued at a bilateral or multilateral level. At the beginning of the 1990s, U.S. officials became wary of risking casualties in regions that were not considered in the country’s strategic interests—regardless of the human rights implications. In 1993, for example, the Clinton administration beat a hasty retreat from Somalia after 18 U.S. peacekeepers were killed. A post-Somalia strategy that eschewed peacekeeping and so-called nation-building efforts led to what Shattuck called the "perfect human rights storm:" the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where some 800,000 people were massacred in less than four months while the United Nations, the United States, and other nations failed to intervene.

The same lack of will allowed the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina—which Shattuck termed "the defining crisis of the 1990s"—to stretch for more than three years, killing at least 200,000 people. That conflict ended only after NATO intervened aggressively in 1995 in the wake of the massacre of 7,000 Muslim men and boys outside Srebrenica. Shattuck said that this single incident was the "greatest catastrophe of post-war Europe" and was the direct result of "the failure of collective security everywhere."

Srebrenica marked a turning point for the Clinton administration, according to Shattuck. Less than four years later, for instance, NATO airstrikes on Serbian positions effectively ended armed conflict in Kosovo with far fewer deaths. A new doctrine of humanitarian intervention, linking human rights and security, seemed to have been embraced by U.S. officials.

Shattuck said that because the events in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Rwanda were so removed for most Americans, the general public was blissfully unaware of the forces of disintegration. That all changed, he said, after September 11. What Americans have yet to realize, however, is that the U.S. war on terrorism has created a climate in which human rights abuses are accepted and even mandated—both in the United States and abroad. He gave five examples of such abuses that have resulted from U.S. policies:

• any country that allies itself with the United States in the war against terrorism now has carte blanche to commit its own human rights abuses. Examples include the Russian government in Chechnya, the Chinese government in its Muslim regions; and Indonesia in unruly provinces such as Aceh;
• an assault on civil liberties in the United States. A key example is the designation of certain U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants," which is a direct derogation of the Bill of Rights;
• the dismissal of international laws, as evidenced by the detainment of more than 600 people in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba without being charged;
• the elevation of the doctrine of pre-emptive action, in which the United States reserves the right to intervene wherever and whenever it wishes. Shattuck argues that this doctrine has already emboldened states such as Israel and North Korea to take aggressive measures that restrict human rights;
• the loss of "soft power" and the turning away from alliances. The United States is no longer a beacon but a fortress, Shattuck said.

Shattuck contended that the current administration has not learned the necessary foreign policy lessons from the 1990s; as a result, human rights are completely subsumed by a focus on power. He said the key lessons should be:

• leadership from the top is vital—especially presidential directives that mobilize democracy;
• the importance of multilateral strategies, not unilateral ones;
• initial strategies should focus on preventing conflict through diplomacy, not intervention;
• the right to use force should be exercised when diplomacy is exhausted—such as when genocide occurs. Ideally such force should be used with multilateral support;
• all strategies must include a strong commitment to nation-building.

Shattuck concluded that the current problems in Iraq are the direct result of the Bush administration’s failure to learn these lessons, in particular the necessity of multilateralism.

Samantha Power

Samantha Power’s remarks focused primarily on the constantly shifting status of human rights as a U.S. foreign policy concern, an issue that figures prominently in Shattuck’s book.

Power argued that the U.S. government’s reluctance to be consistent about its human rights goals and priorities has helped create distrust and confusion both domestically and abroad. She said that "when we do something humanitarian, we inevitably back into it and inevitably rush out of it," often without thinking carefully about what the ultimately effect will be. After the Taliban were overthrown in Afghanistan, for example, U.S. funding and attention shifted elsewhere, thus laying the seeds for the country’s ongoing struggles and inability to establish stability outside of the capital, according to Power. Although not necessarily true in this case—given the Taliban’s role in international terrorism and domestic oppression—Power noted that "sometimes half-hearted interventions are worse than none at all."

Power outlined three policy changes that could help make the United States a "vanguard force" for human rights in the future. First, she said, the government should not operate "a la carte" any more. Even though it claimed it was acting at least partly from a human rights standpoint, the United States was unable to garner significant multilateral support for the Iraq invasion because it had alienated other countries in the recent past through its abrupt, unilateral, or inconsistent-seeming policy decisions. For example, she said, the U.S. effort to "destroy" the international criminal court, an entity that nearly all its allies support, came across as a direct attack on human rights. Similarly, U.S. support for repressive regimes in countries such as Uzbekistan has been criticized for its willful ignorance of severe human rights abuses.

Second, Power said, the United States needs to be "far more historically sensitive" and acknowledge its own past actions. She pointed to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s trip this year to Halabja, the predominantly Kurdish city in northern Iraq that was gassed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, killing several thousand people. Powell’s visit was an incredibly powerful statement that brought further attention to a human rights catastrophe, yet many observers were also struck by the fact that he failed to a) acknowledge that he was a member of the Reagan administration at the time of the massacre—and that the U.S. government did not publicize or condemn the atrocity, and b) that the United States backed Iraq in the 1980s during its war with Iran, the conflict that Hussein used as a key pretext for the attack.

Third, the United States must "do away with the conceit of omnipotence" and "omniscience" when it comes to policymaking based on security concerns. One of the virtues of multilateralism, according to Power, is that there is an automatic reality check built into important decisions, especially those that invoke human rights. If a government cannot actually build a public case as to what it wants to do, then it needs to reexamine its reasoning and more carefully consider possible repercussions. Regardless of whether one agrees with the decision to invade Iraq, it is likely that a multilateral approach might have prompted more in-depth discussion of complicated post-conflict issues such as nation-building and internal security.