Playing Favorites on Dictators Robs U.S. of High Ground

Myanmar (formerly Burma) is among the four most repressive countries on Earth, and President Bush is right to strengthen sanctions against the junta of aging generals who have pummeled protesting monks in their monasteries. But what about equally odious regimes with which Washington maintains cordial relations despite appalling human-rights records?

A big power's foreign policy is bound to contain contradictions, but how do we judge which despots to embrace and which to shun?

Should we behave cynically, as so many nations do, and simply befriend those countries that can supply oil or gas, or can help us battle terrorism?

Washington backs Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- who was favored going into national elections this weekend -- despite his military origins and, at best, quasi-democratic tendencies. U.S. officials figure that without Musharraf, the battle against the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan would be lost, and Al Qaeda, now based in northwestern Pakistan, would become even stronger.

The U.S. lavishly supports President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt despite the fact that ordinary Egyptians have few human rights, fundamental freedoms are ignored and democracy is honored more in the breach than in reality. The U.S. State Department occasionally clucks disapproval of Mubarak's excesses but keeps on showering aid. Without him, the U.S. fears, Muslim fundamentalists would govern Egypt and join hands with Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

Earlier we befriended President Islam Karimov, another strong-minded non-democratic ruler, in Uzbekistan. We needed his help in the war in neighboring Afghanistan. However, when he brutalized his own people, massacring hundreds at Andijan in 2005, we were critical. Karimov retaliated by denying the U.S. continued use of a convenient Uzbek air base.

In late September, Bush welcomed President Kurbanguli Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan to the White House with a great show of bonhomie. But Turkmenistan is as depraved a country as Myanmar, and Berdymukhamedov, who assumed office earlier this year, seems to be continuing his predecessor's tight control of the long-deprived Turkmen citizenry. Admittedly, Turkmenistan has oodles of natural gas in its corner of the Caspian Sea, and Washington seeks to have that gas exported through Turkey, not Russia (which now buys trillions of cubic feet at special rates).

Statecraft consists of trade-offs and conscious inconsistencies. A much more high-minded stance is possible, however. If Washington insisted on cool, correct, but not friendly relations with dubious states such as Turkmenistan, and reduced aid to and made difficult choices regarding human-rights violators such as Egypt, the United States would slowly begin to stand upright again internationally. Doing so would put principle before expediency.

During the Cold War, Washington cared about loyalties, not about the quality of a nation's governance or the leadership mettle of national rulers. So the U.S. supported Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo/Zaire as he denied rights to his people and impoverished and destroyed his country while pocketing billions for himself. Washington refrained from criticizing other Latin American, African and Asian dictators so long as they opposed the Soviet Union. American policy under a succession of presidents and secretaries of state was consciously cynical. We thought we could not afford a more upright policy on strategic grounds. We needed allies against the Soviets and were willing to cozy up to political leaders who preyed on their own people and converted national coffers into personal piggy banks.

Now we need to officially evince a distaste of all rulers who govern undemocratically. If that is asking too much, we at least need to loudly label as despotic those who prey mercilessly on their own peoples, such as Myanmar's Senior Gen. Than Shwe and the rulers of Belarus, Equatorial Guinea, North Korea, Syria, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe. Whatever their natural resources, nations that are run tyrannically should be held to account by big powers and world order, with the U.S. in the lead. By so naming unacceptable behavior by rulers and nations, and thus by shaming them, unacceptable practices of governance could be reduced in frequency and repressive scale.

Objective standards already exist, implicitly through the 2005 UN acceptance of the responsibility of strong nations to protect the weak and oppressed, and explicitly through the widespread acceptance of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Those who act against these norms should be condemned and shunned.

If a new American president and her or his administration hewed to those standards and began smiling only at reasonably acceptable regimes, the lives of legions of oppressed in the most desperate states might gradually be improved. Internally developed regime changes might subsequently occur. At the very least, there could at last be no doubt that odious regimes were just that: odious.

Ideally and idealistically, a new American foreign policy would maintain relations with every country, no matter its politics, but would refrain from inviting autocrats to the White House. It would shower no favors and no cash on internal repressors. It would take seriously the wordings of the various international human-rights conventions. It would publicly criticize those national miscreants who systematically abused their own peoples, discriminated against particular ethnic groups, battered minorities and ignored fundamental freedoms.

With such a development of a more ethical foreign policy, Washington would begin the long trek back to winning world respect and legitimacy. Doing so would help to re-establish our national bona fides, particularly if we acted against serial abusers of human rights everywhere, not only in those countries (such as Myanmar) where we have no compelling geostrategic or economic interests.

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Robert I. Rotberg is professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and president of the World Peace Foundation.

robert_rotberg@harvard.edu