Human rights in American foreign policy

"International human rights issues always illuminate the tension between political interest and political ideals. Over the last fifty years, the United States has struggled to achieve an appropriate response to each new human rights crisis, balancing national and global interests as well as pragmatic and humanitarian impulses. Human Rights in American Foreign Policy surveys America's international human rights policies from the Vietnam War era to the end of the Cold War. Global in scope and ambitious in scale, the book examines American responses to a panoply of human rights violations: torture and political imprisonment in South America; apartheid in South Africa; state violence in China; civil wars in Central America; persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union; suppression of movements for democracy and civil liberties in East Asia and Eastern Europe; the chaotic and damaging revolutionary political transitions in Iran, Nicaragua, and the collapsing USSR. Joe Renouard challenges the characterization of American human rights policymaking as one of inaction, hypocrisy, and the maintenance of double standards. Arguing that a consistent standard is impractical, he explores how policymakers and citizens have balanced the narrow pursuit of traditional and national interests with the desire to promote human rights. Human Rights in American Foreign Policy revisits a series of disparate foreign policy decisions during a tumultuous time in world history. Ultimately the United States emerges as neither exceptionally compassionate nor unusually wicked. Rather, it is a nation that manges by turns to be cautiously pragmatic, boldly benevolent, and coldly self-interested"--Unedited summary from book jacket.