Does Freedom Fight Also Apply to Left?

The foreign-policy message that President Reagan sent to Congress a week ago has been hailed by critics as a departure. They find in its support of a “democratic revolution” directed against dictatorships of both the right and the left a move away from the Administration’s focus on anti-communism. In the process they see the crumbling of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal distinction between totalitarian dictatorships of the communist world and authoritarian dictatorships, generally of the right.

And so we have another round in the perennial debate over the way to balance morality and realism in American foreign policy.

It is true that two authoritarian governments of the right have fallen in recent weeks (Haiti and the Philippines), with limited U.S. participation. That certainly does not mean, however, that the Administration has abandoned the distinctions between policy toward communist states and those of the authoritarian right--nor should it. Indeed, it clearly is mindful of the special threat posed by totalitarian states and of the necessity of standing up against them, as the President is doing in regard to Nicaragua.

Until the Carter Administration, the assumption that governed postwar foreign policy had been that the defense of the national interest, including support for America’s strategic allies, would in the main enhance freedom and democracy. In putting a universal human-rights agenda in the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, President Jimmy Carter placed new weight on the ethical-ideals side of the ledger, as against considerations of strategic and moral realism.

Critics of the Carter approach argued that this tilt was inherently self-defeating. If the United States were to pursue the human-rights agenda openly and without inhibition, it would exacerbate tensions with major adversaries (the Soviet Union) and unsettle relationships with a host of traditional allies or friends (Brazil, Ethiopia and Iran were most often mentioned). The consequences of such a policy would in fact prove deleterious to human rights.

This has turned out to be the case. The activist Carter human-rights policies contributed to the destabilization of the governments of Iran and Nicaragua. The successor regimes of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Sandinistas have been not only fiercely anti-American but also regressive in domestic human rights.

The main criticism of the Carter approach is that while its rhetoric envisioned a uniform standard of human rights, its application inevitably led to a double standard, directed paradoxically and sometimes tragically against American allies.

The most obvious illustration of this criticism lies in the symmetrical cases of North Korea and South Korea. Both Korean governments have been charged with violations of human rights. But because North Korea receives its arms from the Soviet Union and has little trade with the United States, it is immune to any American sanction beyond verbal indictment. In contrast, to press South Korea on human rights, the Carter Administration proposed an arms cutoff, troop withdrawals and economic sanctions. As a result, an American adversary, North Korea, which has continued to threaten to invade South Korea, is strengthened relative to the American-allied government of South Korea.

One celebrated approach for rectification of the double standard was advanced in the form of Kirkpatrick’s distinction between totalitarian (usually communist) and authoritarian dictatorships. For many, her emphasis on heightened opposition to totalitarians helps correct the distortions of the Carter policy. It also expresses the fundamental moral difference between the recognized evils of traditional regimes and the new horrors that have been generated by the ideological contortions of the 20th Century.

For Kirkpatrick’s critics, the argument was reductively interpreted as providing an apologia for one class of dictators. But the operational force of her distinction for recent history can be presented in simple terms: There is a crucial difference between dictatorships that have been imposed or maintained by the Soviet Union and those that have not been.

The Brezhnev Doctrine, which affirms the irreversibility of Soviet-backed dictatorships, has been extended beyond Eastern Europe into Africa, Asia and Latin America since the mid-1970s. The result has been a series of popular armed struggles against the consolidation of Soviet-backed regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua and South Yemen.

During the past decade many dictatorships have been transformed for a variety of reasons ranging from the mortality of rulers to popular protest to the desire to achieve national economic growth. The Reagan message to Congress impressively documents this shift to democracy, from Argentina and Brazil to Turkey and Uruguay. None moved from the totalitarian column; all the changes were from the authoritarian column.

Accordingly, this is an opportune time for the Administration to use this distinction for a single standard in support of democracy. The Philippines and Haiti have just been added to the roster of the devolution of dictatorships. Nicaragua, on the other hand, has arrived at the critical point where further consolidation and arming of the Sandinista regime will probably make the dictatorship irreversible.

Critics of the Administration’s position, who have urged active intervention on the side of freedom and democracy, are then put to the test: Does their standard apply to totalitarians on the left as well as the right? If so, that test becomes a vote of support for the opposition to the Sandinista regime. This is the pragmatic and politically realistic moral encoded in the Reagan foreign-policy message.