A Dangerous Place

...The Soviet Union has found it useful-one is tempted to say necessary-to speak the liberal language of rights at the UN and also at home...

...In particular, SALT cannot seriously be defended without the conviction, expressed by our Secretary of State, that the President of the United States and the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "have similar dreams and aspirations about the most fundamental issues...

...But cannot men be led to obligations through rights...

...But it would be a mistake, Moynihan suggests, to abandon the initiative because it has since been misdirected...

...Mansfield's book is particularly helpful in indicating how one might respond to the most fundamental criticism of the doctrine of human rights, that suggested by Sol-zhenitsyn: "It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations...

...In a cable written by Moynihan while Ambassador to India, printed by Buckley as a conclusion to his book and quoted in A Dangerous Place, Moynihan recounts his indignation as he sat as a member of the U.S...

...Moynihan's book points to such an understanding...

...A human-rights policy allows for the constant exposure of Communist tyranny by standards it pretends to accept, and this can help to combat our own "fundamental problem"-"a diminishment of liberal conviction, a decline possibly in energy, which brought about almost an aversion to ideological struggle...

...The arguments for liberalism are superior to those for Marxism, and intelligibly so...

...To do so, our policy of human rights would have to be guided by an understanding which, while friendly to and compatible with liberalism, is not simply liberal...

...Moynihan was, of course, in effect fired by a Republican administration, and the Garter administration, reflecting the sentiment of the bulk of the Democratic Party, has come close to discrediting the idea of human rights...

...As Moynihan well knows, at other times and in other places one might teach other doctrines and march under other banners...

...Moynihan is aware of the dangers...

...In the preface to The Spirit of Liberalism, Mansfield contrasts today's "wishy-washy liberal" with Locke and Jefferson and asks, "Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty...

...What sensible American does not share Acheson's disgust with the United Nations, an organization that so routinely degrades the lofty precepts on which it claims to be based that it seems silly to bother to become indignant anymore...

...Ambassador to the United Nations in late 1970, he ran into Dean Acheson...

...And rights can be allied not just to duty, but also to honor...

...But Moynihan understands as well as anyone the limits of such a strategy, and that, in Mansfield's words, "No one can persuade who thinks he can always persuade, for his rhetorical concessions made to persuade are soon transformed by his eagerness and confidence into real concessions of his own and finally into surrender of his position...

...His purpose in writing is not merely to be of "some historical interest," but "to set forth some of the arguments" upon which the human-rights initiative was based...

...Unless these are better understood-and perfected, and improved-it is not likely the initiative will be sustained," or, one might add, that it will be worth sustaining...

...The proponents of SALT, no longer able even to pretend that it will result in concrete gains in security or savings, or through "linkage," have had to fall back on incantations of the virtues of the dogma of "arms control," offering arguments that seem to consist of equal parts fear, guilt, and wishful thinking...

...Marxism is too weak to stand forth in broad daylight, and liberalism should take full account and advantage of that fact...

...Moynihan argues that his brief tenure at the UN demonstrates that a policy of human rights-whatever its theoretical limitations and practical difficulties-is a powerful, even indispensable, weapon in the defense of liberal democracy...

...For this better understanding, Moynihan's very valuable book can be supplemented by another recent book by a Harvard professor of government, Harvey C. Mansfield's The Spirit of Liberalism...

...There is probably not now in the whole world a totalitarian state which does not have a constitution guaranteeing individual liberties...

...Moynihan urges in his cable that foreign nations "should be told that Americans take the honor of their democracy most seriously, and never issue warnings to those who would besmirch that honor...

...If this strategy allows him to persuade a significant number of his fellow Democrats, in the Senate or elsewhere, that it is legitimate for them to follow his lead in foreign policy, then he will be vindicated...

...This suggests not only how easy it is to corrupt the language of human rights, but also, and more importantly, its power: Communist regimes which in principle reject such bourgeois rights find it expedient publicly to subscribe to them...

...Who but Moynihan?-the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle with formidable adversaries, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into merely transitory debates certain truths, important to be told in our time...

...contributed to the recent emergence of human rights as an issue of American foreign policy...

...Modern liberalism cannot but be somewhat moralistic or "idealistic...

...This understanding is not so easily arrived at as Moynihan suggests when he claims that "the genius of the issue of human rights is that it is simple...

...Whether Moynihan will succeed in inspiriting the Democratic Party, or whether we shall have to depend primarily on the Republicans (and on how many of them...

...to elaborate the appropriate position of the United States as a leader of "the party of liberty" in a world unfriendly to liberty, is an interesting question...

...When offered the UN Ambassadorship again in 1975, Moynihan accepted the "ridiculous job" and proceeded to use the United Nations as a forum in which to launch a campaign in defense of liberal democracy and liberty, a campaign which, as Moynihan remarks, William Kristol is a lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania...

...Moynihan's deeds- a demonstration of how we should shoulder our responsibility to defend human rights -exemplify this possibility, and they follow from an American tradition of finding a basis for duty in a doctrine of rights...

...Whatever the answer, it should not affect our judgment of this book and the enterprise of which it is a part...

...The proper use of the issue of human rights requires a clear understanding that can support liberal conviction and protect the doctrine from corruption...

...Human rights is a powerful weapon...

...But in his very fine United Nations Journal, in a passage Moynihan quotes, William F. Buckley, Jr., reminds us that "The United Nations is the most concentrated assault on moral reality in the history of free institutions, and it does not do to ignore that fact or worse, to get used to it...

...When that happens, something extraordinarily disagreeable happens next, and the victim is left to figure it out for himself...

...As senator, Moynihan has discomfitted some of his supporters by the concessions he has apparently felt it prudent to make so as to be in the mainstream of his party...

...Can the doctrine of human rights properly understood indirectly contribute to such a moderation and elevation...

...Are not those who reject an emphasis on human rights as Wilsonian utopianism themselves Utopian, unless they are willing, as in the case of George Kennan, to accept a major American retreat...

...While Moynihan notes "the superior capacity of Marxist argument to induce guilt" in liberals, he also emphasizes the extent to which "liberal democracy makes great claims on nonliberal societies, and has done so for some time...

...delegation to the UN in 1971 and heard "the honor of American democracy'' being impugned...

...The spirit of "arms control'' is directly opposed to that of human rights, and the debate over the SALT treaty could allow for a clear articulation of the principles of a foreign policy consistent with Moynihan's initiative...

...It is likely that the strongest blow that could be struck for human rights in 1979 would be the defeat in the Senate of the SALT treaty...

...The attempt to substitute a "mature" policy of Realpolitik seems to enervate liberal spirit without achieving much in reality, and to bring with it its own more dangerous form of utopianism...

...But Moynihan would not, I believe, be afraid to say that the doctrine of human rights, properly understood, is the best-suited of all theoretical doctrines to the needs of our time...

...As Mansfield points out, the Declaration of Independence justifies the reasonable exercise of the right of revolution, which leads to a coincidence of right and duty: "it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government...

...Moynihan, and Buckley, to whom Moynihan gives generous credit for being perhaps the first to appreciate the great "strategic gains we would stand to make by an undisguised, and undissimu-lated, constancy to ideals nominally promulgated by the United Nations," understand the possibility of teaching a kind of duty and honor in a liberal democracy, and how duty and honor can elevate the character of that liberal democracy...

...A Dangerous Place makes the case for the doctrine of human rights as a central theme of American foreign policy, though not for every doctrine that passes under that name...

...Moynihan," Acheson exclaimed, "my respect for you took a precipitous decline when I learned you even considered that ridiculous job...

...BOOK REVIEW A Dangerous Place Daniel Patrick Moynihan / Atlantic-Little, Brown / $12.50 William Kristol Shortly after Daniel Patrick Moynihan had declined the position of U.S...

...The prospects for carrying forward Moynihan's initiative are not very encouraging...

...What is the proper place of human rights in American foreign policy...

...The Declaration ends with an acknowledgment, or rather an assertion, of the importance of the honor of a few as a support for liberal democracy: The representatives who sign the Declaration pledge to each other, for the support of their declaration, their lives, their fortunes, and their "sacred honor...

...Is it not too hopeful to expect to moderate liberalism by a head-on confrontation with its moralism and universalism...

...For what is the choice...

...One benefit of such a policy might be to blunt the force of the guilt "which our adversaries contrive to have us use against ourselves...

...Two pages later, Moynihan details the concept's quick degradation, which "was perhaps to be expected," exemplified by President Carter's statement that "I think that our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland.'' The doctrine of human rights can become foolish, perhaps corrupting, and even dangerous, if badly understood...

...Liberalism indeed needs to be moderated and also elevated...

...One can have reservations about a campaign on behalf of human rights, with its tendency to simple-minded universality, to irresponsibility, and to a possible debasing of the idea of human rights...