ABSTRACT
Building on the general discussion of human rights and foreign policy in the preceding chapter, this chapter looks in some detail at human rights in US foreign policy. It examines American “exceptionalism” as a guiding thread for understanding American human rights policies and practices. The chapter then considers two Cold War-era case studies (Central America and South Africa) and a contemporary case study (Israeli settlements in the West Bank). President Harry S. Truman was a very strong supporter of human rights at the United Nations and in 1946 he named Eleanor Roosevelt as the American representative to the newly formed Commission on Human Rights. Trump’s international human rights policy reflects his general rejection of the multilateral institutions and partnerships that the United States forged in the decades following World War II—what many refer to as the “post-war international order”—in favor of an aggressive and often personalistic unilateralism.
