American foreign policy in the late 1970s found itself in an existential debate. Human rights had become the centrepiece of the Carter administration’s international agenda, with public scoldings of authoritarian allies in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, and a quest for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union. To many traditionalists this policy seemed well-intentioned, but strategically mad. It led directly to the collapse of important American allies in Iran and Nicaragua, and the rise of anti-Western revolutions in their place.
Enter Jeane Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat and professor of political science at Georgetown University.
In a blistering 1979 essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in the magazine Commentary, Kirkpatrick strongly and vigorously defended the policy of supporting pro-Western autocrats. Her intellectual arguments caught the attention of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who hired her as his chief foreign policy advisor and then appointed her the first woman to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Jeane Kirkpatrick United States Ambassador to the United Nations Universal History Archive / Getty Images Universal History Archive / Getty Images
The resulting “Kirkpatrick Doctrine” provided the intellectual underpinning for Reagan’s Cold War strategy. It changed the way the United States related to dictators the world over, putting geopolitical alignment ahead of moral purity in the fight against Soviet expansionism.
The main thesis: authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes.
To understand the Kirkpatrick Doctrine it is essential to analyse the critical difference she made between two kinds of non-democratic governments: authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes.
“American foreign policy makers routinely made a catastrophic mistake in treating all dictatorships as morally and structurally the same,” Kirkpatrick said.
1. Authoritarian regimes (classical dictatorships)
Autocracies such as the military-run Argentina, Pinochet’s Chile or Somoza’s Nicaragua Kirkpatrick called traditional authoritarian states.
Usually, she said, these regimes were concerned with keeping political power, maintaining public order and protecting wealth. But they typically retained traditional social structures. Churches, local businesses, family networks, and private civic institutions. Kirkpatrick claimed that authoritarian governments were not completely in control of their societies and so could be gradually reformed from within and become democratic.
2. Totalitarian states (communist countries)
Totalitarian systems, by contrast, were those of Marxist-Leninist regimes such as the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Sandinista-run Nicaragua.
The governments sought complete, microscopic control of all aspects of human life: the economy, religion, family life, education, culture. They systematically destroyed all independent civil institutions and replaced them with state-controlled party apparatuses. Kirkpatrick argued that totalitarian systems were almost incapable of peaceful internal reform, because they destroyed the social infrastructure necessary for self-government, and tended to produce permanent, irreversible tyrannies.
The Policy prescription: pragmatic realist
Based on this Kirkpatrick argued that it was very irresponsible to overthrow a friendly pro-Western authoritarian ruler in the name of immediate human rights if the likely successor was a pro-Soviet totalitarian movement.
She famously nailed the flaw in President Carter’s policy when she wrote:
Few notions have been more influential in the U.S. foreign policy establishment than the idea that democracies can be built, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances… But history shows that the development of functioning democratic institutions is a long, slow, difficult process.
Her prescription: clear policy
- Support Autocrats Who Are on the Side of Western Security: The United States should tolerate, support, and work with anti-communist authoritarian governments to maintain regional stability and contain Soviet influence.
- Privately Apply Pressure: Rather than publicly shaming allied autocrats, Washington should use private diplomatic channels to encourage gradual reforms while preserving the regime’s security against radical insurgents.
- Understand Regional Realities: It was dangerously unrealistic to expect that developing countries caught in the throes of domestic turmoil would quickly adopt Western parliamentary norms.
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine in Action: Reagan Years
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981 Kirkpatrick was quickly appointed to the Cabinet and assigned a place on the National Security Council. Her doctrine became the operational manual for US policy in Central America, Africa and Asia.
Contras and Central America
Never was the doctrine more evident than in Central America. Despite well-documented human rights abuses by Salvadoran security forces and death squads, the Reagan administration provided massive military and financial support to the military government of El Salvador embroiled in a fight with left-wing FMLN guerrillas.
At the same time, the administration began a secret campaign of aid to the “Contras” — an anti-communist coalition of rebels fighting to overthrow the Soviet-backed Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine held that the most important thing was to defeat the totalitarian Sandinistas, even if that meant working with some unsavoury right-wing elements.
The UN Stage: Stubborn Opposition
As Ambassador to the United Nations, Kirkpatrick became legendary for her pugnacity. She dismissed the diplomatic niceties of the diplomatic corps, openly challenging Soviet delegates, Third World non-aligned coalitions, and Western allies who criticised American policy.
She said that the UN had established a hypocritical ‘double standard,’ always condemning human rights violations in pro-Western countries such as Israel, South Africa or Chile, but never saying a word about the massive state repression in the Soviet bloc, Cambodia or Cuba.
Her readiness to go it alone and to veto in defence of American interests made her a hero among American conservatives and a lightning rod for international criticism.
Criticisms and Moral Controversies
The Kirkpatrick Doctrine sparked fierce controversy during the Cold War and remains one of the most controversial foreign policy paradigms in modern history.
Human rights organisations, legal experts and progressive lawmakers have launched several major arguments against her framework:
- Moral Complicity in Atrocities: By giving military aid, training and diplomatic cover to brutal regimes in Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador the United States became directly complicit in widespread torture, extrajudicial killings and massacres carried out by military junta death squads.
- The Falldown of the Totalitarian Premise The events of the late 1980s directly challenged Kirkpatrick’s theoretical foundation. The “unreformable” Soviet totalitarian system quickly reformed itself when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), leading to the peaceful collapse of Eastern European communist regimes and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.
- Blowback and Anti-Americanism: Washington’s backing of corrupt, repressive dictators turned millions of civilians in the Global South against America, fostering deep anti-American sentiment and supporting radical movements that carried on long after the Cold War was over.
Historical Reappraisal: Did the Doctrine Work?
After her tenure at the UN, Kirkpatrick went back to teaching and research at the American Enterprise Institute, and was a powerful voice until her death in December 2006.
Scholars evaluate the Kirkpatrick Doctrine as a complex Cold War exercise in survival logic, in terms of historical distance:
- Democratic turnovers Did Happen: Proponents of the doctrine note that a number of the pro-Western authoritarian governments the U.S. supported in the 1980s — South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, the Philippines, Argentina, for example — did in the end become stable, prosperous constitutional democracies, just as Kirkpatrick had predicted.
- Containment Achieved Its Goal: In the 1980s, the administration was able to resist Soviet expansion in the Third World, at a cost to Moscow’s resources it could not afford, and so helped to assure the eventual Western victory in the Cold War.
Jeane Kirkpatrick’s legacy reminds us of the enduring problem of American power. She forced foreign policy thinkers to confront a cold, uncomfortable truth: in a messy world, states are often forced to choose between bad choices and balancing moral ideals with geopolitical realities requires a hard look at national interests.ts.
