Controversial campaign for human rights is gaining ground
Just before helicoptering away for his weekend trip to New England last Friday, Jimmy Carter signed in the Oval Office a two-page Presidential Directive, a set of marching orders from the Commander in Chief to his troops in the Executive Branch. Stamped CONFIDENTIAL in large red capital letters, the PD, as it is known, will be circulated this week among top officials in nine agencies of the Government.
"It shall be a major objective of U.S. foreign policy to promote human rights throughout the world," the paper began. "The policy shall be applied globally, but with due consideration to the cultural, political and historical characteristics of each nation and to other fundamental U.S. interests with respect to the nation in question."
While not the most stirring piece of prose to come out of the White House, the PD is one of the more important papers to have crossed Carter's desk in recent weeks. The reason, reports TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, is that it displays Carter's determination to continue using U.S. economic aid, military assistance and diplomatic pressure to promote human rights in foreign countries, wherever and whenever other U.S. interests permit.
Presidential National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that the human rights initiative has put the U.S. "back on the moral offensive" round the globe. It is, in fact, a characteristically American effort to achieve something most nations would consider quixotic—combining world power with moral principle. The human rights campaign, unveiled by Carter in his Inaugural Address, has also been the object of more passionate advocacy and more scornful criticism than any other single element of his foreign policy. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev has denounced the human rights policy as interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A number of American critics, too, have decried Carter's approach as rhetorical and naive. Several Soviet dissidents, on the other hand, have credited the Carter policy with keeping their movement alive. Minnesota Congressman Donald Eraser, leader of an ad hoc human rights group on Capitol Hill, says he would "like to see the Administration do even more."
Largely because of the controversy the policy has stirred, the Administration has been carrying out a secret review of it since last summer. This PD is the result. Says Jessica Tuchman, 31, the National Security Council (NSC) staffer in charge of human rights: "The directive tries to give the bureaucracy general guidelines to shape the official consideration of human rights. It will do two things: protect the policy from those who think it should be jettisoned, and protect it, equally, from those who think human rights have to be the paramount concern all the time."