ABSTRACT
When President Jimmy Carter launched his human rights policy, its course was confused and poorly plotted. The administration has never been willing to apply any human rights principles to the so-called “hard cases,” the countries which we deem “important” for one reason or another: Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Zaire, and Argentina. The administration's vulnerability to the rhetoric of the cold war results from its inability or unwillingness to develop broad popular support for a different foreign policy. The centerpiece of a domestic human rights agenda should be a focus on economic and social rights. The rhetoric of human rights, of idealism and principle, has won public purchase of an activist foreign policy which otherwise would have been most difficult to sell. A domestic human rights agenda offers the only possibility for developing a broad popular constituency freed from the cold war combination of military expenditure, foreign intervention, and economic expansion.
