U.S. Human Rights Policy in the Post‐Cold War Era

Historically, the implementation of U.S. human rights policy has been a case of "two steps forward, one step back." From its earliest days, the United States has attempted, at least to some degree, to include morality, the protection of individual rights, and the spread of democracy in foreign policy calculations. These efforts became more prominent after World War II. By the late 1980s, human rights concerns were firmly embedded in U.S. foreign policy rhetoric, policymaking institutions, and global actions. Despite these long-term trends, full policy implementation of human rights principles was constrained over time by lack of U.S. power, U.S. wariness of multilateral institutions and international legal commitments, competing policy priorities, and the limited institutional power of U.S. human rights advocates. The end of the Cold War and other contemporaneous international and domestic shifts appeared to finally remove these long-standing limitations. Now, a little more than a decade later, it is clear that human rights considerations have shaped recent policies in many ways. Strikingly, though, past limitations have per sisted. The continuing existence of these limits shows that they were never short-term, era-specific problems, but rather deeper constraints that stem from the realities of global and domestic politics. Thus, although human rights con siderations have become an important component of policy, those observers expecting a dominant role for human rights in U.S. foreign policy will always be disappointed and may fail to appreciate the progress that does occur.