An Analysis Of The Essence Of Carter’s Human Rights Diplomacy

In September 1976,Leterlier,former Chilean Ambassador to the United States and Defense Minister,was killed in a terrorist attack in Washington D.C.,which attracted the attention of all over the world.The Carter administration of the United States who took office in January 1977 set human rights diplomacy as the basic principle of foreign relations,the Letelier assassination,a transnational terrorist incident that seriously violated human rights,became a testing ground for the Carter administration to strictly carry out human rights diplomacy.After the Carter administration seriously investigated the Letelier assassination,the result showed that Letelier’s assassination was inextricably related to the Chilean military government of Pinochet.However,during the trial,Chile refused to extradite Chileancriminals involved in the assassination,leading the relationship between US-Chile to a stalemate.In the face of the complex problems such as the decline of the relaxation between the East and the West in the late 1970s,the domestic economic stagflation crisis and the national intelligence interests of the United States,the Carter administration finally adopted relatively lenient sanctions for Chile’s refusals in the dilemma between the realistic interests and upholding the morality of human rights,which led to a serious impact and doubts on Carter’s human rights policy.The full text is mainly divided into five chapters: the first chapter analyzes the background of the rise of American human rights diplomacy in the 1970s and the discord between the Nixon-Ford administration and Congress on human rights issues.The second chapter mainly introduces the origin of Letterer and the assassination and the attitude of the Ford government to deal with the case.The third chapter links the process of dealing with the Letterrier assassination with the United States’ human rights diplomacy to Chile and makes an analysis.The fourth chapter focuses on the reasons why the Carter administration imposed mild sanctions on Chile,and the fifth chapter analyzes the essence of the Carter administration’s human rights diplomacy based on the treatment of the Letelier assassination,and gives a relatively objective evaluation of the Carter administration’s human rights diplomacy.This paper argues that the handling of the Letelier assassination reveals that when there was a conflict between human rights diplomacy and the Cold War anti-communist strategy,the Carter administration would resolutely choose the Cold War strategy and national interests as the priorities of its foreign policy,and the essence of US human rights diplomacy was the realistic diplomacy under the banners of improving human rights.The human rights diplomacy of the Carter administration did contribute to the improvement of the human rights situation in the world to a certain extent,but in the process of implementation,the human rights diplomacy of the Carter administration was not successful because of the fetter of various factors at home and abroad simultaneously.There is no denying that the Carter administration’s commitment to human rights is a “valuable” legacy to U.S.human rights foreign policy.