Human Rights in American Foreign Policy. Joe Renouard

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      Introduction: A Riot in Washington

      November 15, 1977, began like most any other fall day in Washington. The morning temperature hovered in the upper forties, and the forecast called for an afternoon high of around sixty. It had been unusually cool in the District of late, and residents welcomed the return of warmer weather. On Capitol Hill, the 95th Congress was working through its customary autumn slate of committee hearings and legislative proposals, with staffers poring over reams of bills on foreign affairs, the economy, and the more mundane matters of congressional governance. At the White House, President Jimmy Carter’s morning was taken up with the usual round of cabinet meetings and advisers’ briefings, as well as an interview with New York Times foreign affairs columnist C. L. Sulzberger.

      The central item on Carter’s agenda that day was an official visit by the head of state of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi. The United States had maintained a special relationship with the Shah for a quarter of a century, and the new American president was eagerly anticipating his first meeting with this longtime ally. In accordance with the Shah’s importance to the United States, the White House planned to pull out all the stops with a state dinner, policy meetings, and multiple photo ops with the Shah and his elegant wife, Empress Farah. The United States had many reasons to value the Shah’s friendship. Not only did he provide a steady source of oil, but he had solidified relations with Israel and the large Arab states of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and he stood as a reliable bulwark against Soviet ambitions along the two nations’ fifteen-hundred-mile border. In return for the Shah’s secular anticommunism, oil, and Western orientation, the United States had provided him with modern weapons, diplomatic support, and favorable trade deals.

      There was just one problem: the Western-leaning, Western-educated Shah was no Western liberal. He had ascended the throne in 1941, and he had seen his power greatly augmented in 1953 following a U.S.-backed coup. In the ensuing years he had ruled more like an eighteenth-century absolutist than a twentieth-century democrat. Iran’s political institutions were ill-equipped to accommodate dissent or a political transition, and its security agency, SAVAK, was widely accused of imprisoning, torturing, and even killing dissidents. The Shah deemed these authoritarian measures necessary for a feudal society making the transition to modernity, but in the 1970s more and more Western critics were speaking out against such methods. True, the Shah was hardly the worst human rights abuser in the world. His ambitious modernization program had benefited many Iranians, and he had recently implemented a set of limited legal and social reforms.¹ But his one-party government was neither liberal nor democratic.

      The Shah’s human rights record had been of little interest to American policymakers, but Jimmy Carter was a new kind of executive. He had campaigned on a promise to bring moral values to governance, and since his inauguration he had pursued an ambitious human rights policy. This activism put him into a difficult position. If he publicly confronted the Shah, he would damage the vital U.S.-Iran relationship. But if he ignored the Shah’s transgressions, he would risk losing credibility for all СКАЧАТЬ