The Foreign Service Journal, September 2007

These freedoms were later enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. Gen- eral Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948. (An American delega- tion led by Eleanor Roosevelt played a central drafting role.) Over the following decades, the United States part- nered with other governments, institutions and individu- als to construct a framework of international law and a tradition of respect for human rights that mark the post- World War II era as unique in history. Through a broad body of treaties, conventions and accepted international practice the international community, for the first time, conferred legitimacy on a code of international conduct based on fundamental “human rights.” The Human Rights Ediface For more than half a century the United States led the international community in the construction and cod- ification of that human rights edifice, though American leadership faltered at times. In the long “twilight strug- gle” against Soviet authoritarianism, Washington some- times pursued policies that debased international respect for human rights. It undermined or overthrew democra- tically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile, among other places. It conspired with authoritar- ian allies in Indonesia, Central and South America and elsewhere, whose acts against their own people blatantly violated human rights. It made war in places like Vietnam, and took military action in places such as Cuba, Grenada, Panama and Nicaragua, which — even at the time but especially in historical hindsight — appears indefensible. It was slow to react to extraordinary human rights abuses in South Africa as well as those carried out by allies, including in the Middle East, from Shah Pahlevi’s Iran to the Palestine territories. Moreover, the U.S. largely ignored those rights iden- tified in the Universal Declaration in the economic, social and cultural spheres, focusing more narrowly on civil, political and religious freedoms. The plight of the world’s poor for much of the Cold War tended to fall out- side the “Free World’s” main agenda of containment of and occasional confrontation with the Soviet-led commu- nist world. In the post–Cold War era, the United States’ pro-globalization policies, spurred by trade deals that undermined or ignored worker rights and environmental concerns, further impaired the rights of the world’s poor. Notwithstanding the failure of the U.S. and the rest of the international community to fulfill the full panoply of bold, unprecedented promises of human freedom en- shrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the course of human history and the place of human rights and human welfare in the international system after 1948 appeared forever altered. Henceforth, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated in the American civil rights context, “the arc of history may be long, but it bends toward justice.” Today, six years since the attacks inspired by al-Qaida on the United States, and following additional attacks in London, Madrid, Bali and elsewhere, it is no longer clear that the Universal Declaration or Roosevelt’s “four free- doms” were any more than a poignant voicing of hope that briefly illuminated a new vision of human freedom. The vicious terror tactics employed by al-Qaida and its supporters would soon engender a response by the U.S. and its allies that was sometimes equally vicious and sim- ilarly embraced the rationalization that innocent suffer- ing or “collateral damage” is inevitable in the pursuit of victory. Presaging the devaluing of human rights in U.S. foreign policy, as early as 2002 a senior American official would mock the Geneva Convention, a key pillar in that human rights edifice, as “quaint.” A Moment of Great Peril In his 1941 State of the Union speech, President Roosevelt portrayed an America in dire peril, warning Congress that “at no previous time has American secu- rity been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.” Despite the impending world war that his address foresaw, Roosevelt cautioned against compro- mises that would vitiate fundamental freedoms. He advised: “Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the sta- mina and the courage which come from unshakeable belief in the manner of life which we are defending. F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 Edmund McWilliams entered the Foreign Service in 1975, serving in Vientiane, Bangkok, Moscow, Kabul, Islama- bad, Managua, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Jakarta and Washing- ton, D.C. He opened the posts in Bishkek and Dushanbe, and was the first chief of mission in each. In 1998, he received AFSA’s Christian Herter Award for constructive dissent by a senior FSO. Since retiring from the Senior Foreign Service in 2001, he has worked with various U.S. and foreign human rights NGOs as a volunteer.