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Both extremes are represented within the Government. During the first months of the Carter presidency, the policy met considerable resistance from career foreign-service officers, who felt that the new emphasis on human rights jeopardized traditional friendships and interests. Other officials have had to get used to the fact that sometimes human rights must yield precedence to other more mundane or more pressing strategic goals. Says the NSC's Tuchman, who is the daughter of Historian Barbara Tuchman: "In foreign policy, there is always bound to be a point where one has to pursue conflicting interests. When that time comes, you have to decide which interests you're going to pursue most vigorously. Otherwise you might overload the circuit." In the first three weeks of Carter's Administration, he blew several fuses in U.S.-Soviet relations by publicly protesting the harassment of Nobel Peace Prizewinner Andrei Sakharov. The Kremlin reacted by cracking down even harder on dissidents and warning Washington that the human rights campaign was "incompatible" with detente in general and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in particular. Since then, Carter, Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance have continued to remonstrate with the Russians on behalf of persecuted dissenters—but privately, through diplomatic channels, and so far with little visible effect.
The chief impact of the human rights policy has occurred not in the Communist world but in developing countries, where the U.S. dispenses largesse and therefore has leverage. The principal instruments for applying pressure are Public Law-480 food aid, grants from the Agency for International Development, military aid and bank loans—all told, nearly $10 billion annually.
Virtually every aid proposal within the State Department is routed through a newly created Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. That unit is headed by Assistant Secretary of State Patricia Derian, 49, a combative and articulate civil rights activist from Mississippi. Derian has traveled to 15 countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe to explain Administration policy and inspect local conditions. She and eight deputies make sure that the human rights performance of every would-be recipient of U.S. aid is taken into account before a grant, loan or sale is approved.
"Obviously," she says, "if a repressive regime wants to buy police equipment from the U.S., our recommendation is going to be no, and the sale is likely not to go through. But often it's not that simple. Human rights have an economic component too: the right to food, shelter and medical care. We understand that for a poor country, trying to feed everybody is a human rights problem as well. So if we get a proposed loan for a big water project, and it turns out that 99% of the water is going to be used for a private industry in a country with serious human rights problems, that would get a negative vote. But if the water is going to a slum area, where people now have to walk two miles to carry water by bucket, that's entirely different. We might very well favor such a loan."