Jeane Kirkpatrick Taught the Right to Tell Allies from Enemies

The most influential foreign-policy distinction in the modern conservative movement was drawn by a Democrat. She was a professor at Georgetown, a supporter of the party's anti-Soviet wing, and the author of an article in a magazine most Americans have never opened. Within two years of its publication the President of the United States had made her his ambassador to the United Nations. This is the story of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and it is worth telling because her central idea is both one of the most useful in the conservative tradition and one of the most contested.

I will profile her career, set out her argument in my own words, show what it explained and what it missed, and give her critics a full hearing. The thesis is that Kirkpatrick was right about something important and incomplete about something larger. She was right that a statesman has to tell the difference between a flawed friend and a determined enemy. She was incomplete in assuming that the difference would hold still.

The life, in brief

Jeane Kirkpatrick was born Jeane Duane Jordan on November 19, 1926, in Duncan, Oklahoma. She studied at Stephens College and Barnard, earned her doctorate in political science at Columbia, and taught at Georgetown University. Her scholarly interests ran to politics, ideology and the structure of political parties. For much of her adult life she was a Democrat, associated with the party's anti-Communist current. She co-founded the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that warned about Soviet strength.

She changed parties later. In 1985, after leaving government, she registered as a Republican. Her biography is a reminder that the conservative movement, in foreign policy, was joined by people who did not start on the right and arrived because of what they thought of the Cold War. That is a lesson for a movement that likes to think it grows only from its own roots: it grew, in part, because people who took the Soviet challenge seriously found that they no longer had a home on the left.

She died on December 7, 2006. She spent her working life on the question of how a democracy meets its enemies.

The setting: 1979

To read her famous essay you have to remember the year. In January 1979, the Shah of Iran, an American ally who ruled as an autocrat, left his country under pressure from a revolution, and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon established an Islamic republic. In July 1979, the Sandinistas, a revolutionary movement with Marxist leadership, took power in Nicaragua after the fall of the long-ruling Somoza family. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants seized the American embassy in Tehran and took hostages. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December.

The Carter administration had put human rights at the center of its foreign policy. Its critics said that this had in practice meant pressuring friendly authoritarian governments, such as the Shah and Somoza, while going easy on adversaries. Kirkpatrick's article took that critique and made it systematic.

The argument of "Dictatorships and Double Standards"

The essay appeared in Commentary magazine in November 1979. I will paraphrase it rather than quote it, and I will state it as a series of premises.

One. Not all non-democratic governments are the same. There is a difference between a traditional autocracy and a revolutionary, totalitarian one. A traditional autocracy, such as the governments of the Shah or of Somoza, rules through existing social structures, such as the army, the landowners and the church, and it generally leaves people alone as long as they do not threaten the regime. It can be brutal, but it does not seek to remake the whole of society, or to control every part of a person's life.

Two. A totalitarian regime does. A revolutionary government of the Marxist-Leninist kind claims the whole of social life: the economy, the school, the family, the church and the mind. It cannot tolerate independent institutions, because they are the seeds of opposition.

Three. That difference matters because of what can change. A traditional autocracy, because it leaves families, churches, markets and other institutions standing, can evolve. Those institutions can become a basis for pluralism, and in the course of time the regime can liberalize. A totalitarian regime, she argued, had never been known to liberalize from within, because it had destroyed the institutions from which reform might come. Those who came after the Shah and Somoza, she warned, were likely to be worse and were not likely to reform.

Four. Therefore American policy should not treat all dictators alike. To press an ally in the name of democracy, and in the process to weaken it and hand the country to an enemy, is a double standard. It holds friends to a stricter measure than enemies, and in the end it produces less liberty. A policy that cannot tell the difference between an authoritarian ally and a totalitarian adversary will keep making the same mistake.

Five. The conclusion was practical, not cynical. Kirkpatrick did not say that authoritarian allies were good, or that the United States should look away from their abuses. She said that the choice before American policymakers was usually between an imperfect friend and a worse enemy, and that the policy should be to reform friends privately, patiently and with attention to what might replace them.

That is the heart of it. The essay's title mentions double standards because the point was about consistency: if we judge a friend by a harsher standard than an enemy, we are not defending freedom, we are fooling ourselves.

The moral ground under the argument

Notice what Kirkpatrick did not say. She did not say that liberty is a minor value, or that democracy is a luxury. Her ground is the one the Declaration of Independence sets: that governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" are the legitimate kind, and that men are endowed with rights that no state may take away. Her claim was about method and sequence. A democracy is more likely to be built on top of a society that still has independent institutions than one flattened by a revolutionary state. An old tradition counsels against pretending that every evil is of equal weight.

I mention this because her critics sometimes said that her distinction was a rationalization for supporting right-wing dictators. That is not what the essay says, and the record of her career does not support it. She spent her working life on the argument that democracy was worth defending. Her question was how to defend it without losing the thing you were trying to protect.

Her time at the United Nations, 1981 to 1985

Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen, brought the essay to Reagan's attention, and she advised his 1980 campaign. After his election, he named her United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a post she held from 1981 to 1985. She was the first woman to hold the job.

Three episodes show her at work.

The Soviet shootdown, September 1983. On September 1, 1983, a Soviet fighter shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a civilian airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard were killed. On September 6, in the Security Council, Kirkpatrick played the recording of the Soviet pilot's communications, and showed the world, in the Soviet Union's own words, how the attack was carried out. It is among the most effective uses of a primary source in the history of American diplomacy, and it forced Moscow's denials to run against the record. See Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned for how the opening of the archives later tested other Cold War claims.

Grenada, October 1983. The American intervention in Grenada drew condemnation at the United Nations, and she defended the action in the forum where it was least popular. The record of that operation is in Grenada in 1983 Was Small, and It Mattered More Than the Critics Admit.

The Falklands, 1982. When Argentina's military government seized the Falkland Islands from Britain in April 1982, Kirkpatrick sympathized with Argentina's junta and favored American neutrality. The administration eventually sided with Britain. It was the point on which her views and the policy diverged most publicly, and her critics have pointed to it as the place where a distinction between "authoritarian friend" and "democratic ally" was tested and found wanting. I will return to that below.

Her years at the United Nations were also a case study in what it means to stand as a representative of a democracy in an institution where democracies are a minority. She was, in the language of the time, a tough advocate who argued that the organization's voting blocs often held the United States to a standard that they did not apply to its adversaries. That, too, was the double-standard argument, applied to diplomacy.

The 1984 convention speech

In 1984, at the Republican National Convention, Kirkpatrick gave a speech that became one of the best-known of that campaign. She had been a Democrat, and she addressed the party she had left. Her accusation was that the leadership of the opposition party had turned toward blaming America for the world's troubles and away from defending it. It made her famous with a wider public, and it is the origin of a phrase that conservatives have used ever since to criticize a style of foreign-policy argument that begins by finding fault with the United States.

The speech has to be read for what it was, a convention speech in an election year, and it carried the exaggerations of the form. A fair reader will notice that it painted a large group with a single brush. But its core argument, that a country's confidence in its own cause is a strategic asset, and that the world looks to an America that believes in itself, is one that Reagan made too. For the same theme in a speech to a foreign legislature, see Reagan at Westminster in 1982 Predicted the Soviet Collapse Out Loud.

The strongest criticisms of her distinction

A profile that does not state the case against its subject is a eulogy. These are the strongest objections to the Kirkpatrick doctrine, in descending order of weight.

First: the distinction can become an excuse. If the label "authoritarian ally" excuses almost anything, then it is a license. Critics point to cases in the 1980s, in Central and South America in particular, where American partners committed serious abuses and the doctrine was invoked to shield them from pressure. A principle meant to give priority to realism can end up as a habit of indifference.

Second: the distinction undersold the possibility of change in the totalitarian world. She argued that Communist regimes did not liberalize from within. Then, in 1989, the Soviet bloc in Europe came apart, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved. That seems a direct challenge to the claim. Her defenders reply that the collapse came in the end from outside pressure, from economic exhaustion and from the strength of the opposition, rather than from a gentle self-reform, and that Reagan's pressure on Moscow helped bring it. The question is open. I would say that her claim was overstated, but her policy implication, that you do not rescue a totalitarian regime from its own contradictions, held up well.

Third: authoritarian allies often do not reform. If traditional autocracies could liberalize, why did many hold on for decades, closing off the very institutions of civil society whose survival she thought would produce reform? In the Philippines, South Korea and Chile, the movement toward democracy came in the 1980s, after years in which friendly authoritarian governments had held on. That suggests that the better version of her doctrine is one that tells friends the truth in private and presses for reform with an eye on what will replace them, which is, in fact, what she said.

Fourth: the Falklands. Her hemisphere-first instinct, in that case, set her against the oldest friendship the United States has, with Britain, and against the principle that aggression should not be rewarded. This is a fair criticism. It shows the danger of any doctrine that ranks regimes by type and forgets that allies are also chosen by shared institutions and history.

A fair summary is that her distinction is a good tool and a poor law. It tells you which questions to ask. It does not answer them for you.

After the Cold War

When the Cold War ended, Kirkpatrick wrote that the United States could return to being a normal country in normal times, free of the special burdens of a superpower's rivalry. In a 1990 essay she argued that the country should take a step back from the extraordinary commitments of the previous four decades. The arguments about how far to step back are still with us, and her view sits within the tradition that cautions against a foreign policy of endless crusades. It is a useful companion to John Quincy Adams Said America Does Not Go Abroad Hunting for Monsters and to What Washington's Farewell Address Really Said About Foreign Entanglements.

It also shows the consistency of her mind. A person who thinks that the Soviet threat is unique will think that its end changes the calculation. A person who treats all regimes alike would have no basis for that change. The distinction she drew in 1979 was a way of saying that the danger comes from particular regimes, with particular ideologies, and that it is not a permanent property of the world.

What we should learn

Here is the lesson in four numbered points.

1. Judge a regime by what it does to its people and what it intends for yours. A friend with faults and an enemy with a program are not the same, and a policy that treats them as the same will fail the people it hopes to help.
2. Ask what comes next. Before pressing an ally to the brink, ask who is waiting to replace him and whether they are better. The people of Iran and Nicaragua learned in 1979 that a worse regime can follow a bad one.
3. Do not use a distinction as a shield. The honest version of her doctrine calls for private pressure on allies and public clarity about the difference. See NSC-68 and the 1950 Memo That Told America the Price of Staying Free for how the country's most important Cold War document made the case for taking the totalitarian threat seriously.
4. Be modest about prediction. The Soviet system did change in a way she did not forecast. The right conclusion is not that her idea failed but that every doctrine should be held with an awareness of its limits.

The case in brief

1. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democrat who became a Republican in 1985, argued in a November 1979 essay that traditional autocracies could evolve while revolutionary totalitarian regimes did not, and that American policy should not treat them alike.
2. The argument rested on a moral claim that consent of the governed is the standard, together with a practical claim that regimes leave behind different institutions, and so different futures.
3. As ambassador to the United Nations from 1981 to 1985, she made the double-standard argument in public, most memorably by playing the Soviet pilot's recording in September 1983.
4. The best criticisms are that the distinction can excuse abuses, that the Soviet bloc did change, that allies often do not reform, and that her Falklands stance cut against old alliances.
5. The right conclusion is that her distinction is a good tool and a poor law: it tells a statesman which questions to ask, and it leaves him the work of answering them.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph, then pick one country the United States calls a friend and write your senators asking what we are doing to encourage its people's liberties.