On her book Jimmy Carter,Human Rights,and the National Agenda
Cover Interview of June 28, 2009
A close-up
Selecting one particular close-up is hard: I’m trying to make the argument that all the different elements of Carter’s treatment of human rights were important. If just one thing had to pulled out, however, it would be the chapter on how four presidents used “human rights.” I looked at the ways Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all used similar language—sometimes to very similar ends and sometimes to very different ones.
Carter wanted to see human rights at the center of our foreign policy—and he wanted to be able to criticize and applaud any nation, whether ally or not, on human rights grounds. He was often criticized, in fact, for being kinder to our opponents than to our allies. Reagan had a very different approach to human rights, and tended to overlook human rights problems in allied countries while focusing on abuses in communist nations. Bill Clinton, governing after the Cold War, took a complex approach to human rights, in which he used the issue as a rationale for intervention in some areas (Bosnia) while avoiding intervention in other areas (Rwanda). And George W. Bush, of course, is the most problematic of the lot, for he used human rights as a reason for the Iraq invasion, and yet had to deal with events like the Guantanamo prison scandal.
This history is crucial because on the one hand, it doesn’t matter who is president—the institution is strong, and whoever sits behind that desk is going to make the same decisions. On the other hand, it matters a great deal who the president is—some decisions, such as the choice to go to war in Iraq, are extraordinarily dependent upon who is in office. The trick is knowing which decisions are which.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
Selecting one particular close-up is hard: I’m trying to make the argument that all the different elements of Carter’s treatment of human rights were important. If just one thing had to pulled out, however, it would be the chapter on how four presidents used “human rights.” I looked at the ways Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all used similar language—sometimes to very similar ends and sometimes to very different ones.
Carter wanted to see human rights at the center of our foreign policy—and he wanted to be able to criticize and applaud any nation, whether ally or not, on human rights grounds. He was often criticized, in fact, for being kinder to our opponents than to our allies. Reagan had a very different approach to human rights, and tended to overlook human rights problems in allied countries while focusing on abuses in communist nations. Bill Clinton, governing after the Cold War, took a complex approach to human rights, in which he used the issue as a rationale for intervention in some areas (Bosnia) while avoiding intervention in other areas (Rwanda). And George W. Bush, of course, is the most problematic of the lot, for he used human rights as a reason for the Iraq invasion, and yet had to deal with events like the Guantanamo prison scandal.
This history is crucial because on the one hand, it doesn’t matter who is president—the institution is strong, and whoever sits behind that desk is going to make the same decisions. On the other hand, it matters a great deal who the president is—some decisions, such as the choice to go to war in Iraq, are extraordinarily dependent upon who is in office. The trick is knowing which decisions are which.