Elliott Abrams on “Dictatorships and Double Standards”

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2017

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We like to think that, amidst all of the pressures of decision, ideas can somehow inspire political action. But how do the arguments of intellectuals actually influence the strategy and implementation of government? In this podcast, foreign policy expert and White House veteran Elliott Abrams joins Jonathan Silver to discuss an essay that did just that.

In November of 1979, American foreign policy was adrift. The Soviet Union was expanding its influence throughout the world, the Shah had fled Iran, and the United States appeared to be losing the Cold War. All the while, President Jimmy Carter’s administration was intent on pursuing a “human rights” policy that went easy on America’s enemies, alienated its allies, and turned a blind eye to those suffering from the worst humanitarian abuses.

It was in this environment that Jeane Kirkpatrick, then a professor at Georgetown University, published her groundbreaking essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in Commentary. In it, she calls out the hypocrisy of the President Carter’s human rights agenda and blasts America’s “posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-à-vis the Third World” as both politically and morally bankrupt. Abrams helps us see what made Kirkpatrick’s argument so important to the history of the Reagan Administration and the Cold War and highlights what her influential essay still has to teach us today.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do ideas move history?
0:10.0	Sometimes ideas take a long time to influence the world of politics and human affairs.
0:16.0	A powerful analysis or philosophical insight might be born as a book, and then find a second
0:22.8	life as the inspiration for an essay or newspaper column, and then finally appear, sometimes
0:29.0	years later, to guide a political decision one way or the other.
0:33.3	In the normal course of events, great ideas are mediated through several different articulations
0:38.4	before they're felt in history, and that's if they're ever felt at all.
0:43.0	I'm Jonathan Silver, host of the Tikva podcast and Great Jewish Essays and Ideas, and in
0:48.3	today's conversation, we're going to revisit an essay that really did shape history, and
0:53.4	almost immediately.
0:55.5	Dictatorships and double standards was written by Gene Kirkpatrick and published in commentary
1:00.9	in 1979. The essay was a major source of inspiration for President Reagan and the American
1:08.3	strategy that he managed to confront and defeat the Soviet Union.
1:12.6	The essay parts ways from progressive assumptions about human agency and the human condition,
1:18.6	and also from the realest way of thinking about the mechanics of state interest.
1:22.6	My guest is Elliot Abrams, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former
1:28.0	Deputy National Security Advisor in the Bush administration, and member, along with Gene
1:33.1	Kirkpatrick, of the Reagan administration's foreign policy staff. Just a reminder before we begin,
1:39.1	if you like listening to our podcast, please subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher, and leave us a rating and a review. If
1:45.5	you want to learn more about our work at Tikva, visit our website, tikvafund.org, and follow
1:50.9	us on Facebook and Twitter.
1:52.1	Elliot Abrams, welcome to the Tikva podcast.
	...

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