Jeane Kirkpatrick as an international thinker

Sophie Joscelyne recently completed her PhD at the University of Sussex. Her article 'Norman Mailer and American Totalitarianism in the 1960s' has been published in Modern Intellectual History.

Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the most - if not the most - influential figures in shaping President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy in his first term. However, she is missing from several important studies of Reagan's time in office and her intellectual contribution to the formation of US foreign policy remains understudied. In this post, I will illuminate the importance of Kirkpatrick and her thought - commenting on the formation, content, and influence of her theory of 'totalitarianism', her role in shaping the Reagan administration's engagement with human rights, and her place in the history of conservative foreign policy thinking.

Kirkpatrick herself was well aware of the pathbreaking nature of her role. In the highly masculine culture of foreign policy-making in the 1980s she felt the strangeness of her position. She often related an incident in which a mouse had once crept into the Situation Room during a meeting of Reagan's inner-circle National Security Planning Group (NSPG). While other members of the group reacted with surprise, Kirkpatrick privately thought: 'That mouse is no more surprising a creature to see in the Situation Room than I am - no stranger a presence here, really, than I am' (Rosen, 1985). Kirkpatrick was the first woman to serve as United States ambassador to the United Nations, as well as the first woman to sit on the National Security Council (NSC) on a regular basis, and the only woman to be a member of the NSPG (Miller Morin, 1987). In 1985, the New York Times identified her as a 'phenomenon in American politics', adding later that 'no woman had ever been so close to the center of presidential power without actually residing in the White House' (Rosen, 1985) (Weiner, 2006).

Kirkpatrick made a vital contribution to thinking on totalitarianism, a concept which helped define the twentieth century and continues to exert a powerful influence on US political discourse to the present day. The article for which she is best known, 'Dictatorships and Double Standards', published in Commentary magazine in 1979, mobilised a definition of totalitarianism which owed much to the authoritative work of 1950s totalitarianism theorists, notably Carl J. Friedrich, though she added her own distinctive emphasis. Many theorists in the 1950s emphasised that the rise of totalitarian states was a radically new phenomenon which represented a fundamental break with the past. They asserted a crucial distinction between totalitarianism and all other forms of 'autocracy' which had previously existed. Thus, Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasised that 'totalitarian dictatorship is historically unique and sui generis' (Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1962 [1956], p. 5). Similarly, Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism that totalitarianism was fundamentally different from 'other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship', forms of government which 'Western thought has known and recognized since the times of ancient philosophy' (Arendt, 1973, p. 460-1).

Kirkpatrick adopted this distinction, but she re-applied it to make a political argument about her contemporary environment (contrary to the historical argument made by previous theorists). She made the distinction between currently existing right-wing 'traditional' autocracies and left wing 'totalitarian' regimes the centrepiece of her argument in 'Dictatorships and Double Standards'. This article led to her position in the Reagan administration. After reading the article, Reagan wrote to Kirkpatrick to say that it had had a 'great impact' on him and caused him to re-evaluate his existing assumptions about American foreign policy (Collier, 2012, p. 105). Reflecting Kirkpatrick's influence from 1981 to 1984, US policy featured accommodation with 'authoritarian' right-wing regimes friendly to the United States and an escalation of Cold War tensions with the 'totalitarian' Soviet Union. Though, as David F. Schmitz has argued, the strategy of supporting authoritarian regimes when it appeared to be in US interests predated the Reagan administration, Kirkpatrick played a key role in reorienting US foreign policy after the upheavals of the Vietnam era and shifting away from the détente and human rights policies pursued by Carter (Schmitz, 2006, p. 8). Kirkpatrick's ideas were particularly apparent in the administration's approach to Latin America - notably in the funding of the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras and support for the government of El Salvador which was threatened by a leftist insurgency.

Kirkpatrick developed her understanding of totalitarianism in a collection of essays centred around her Commentary article. In Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (1982) she argued that the essence of totalitarianism was the expansion of government regulation into the private sphere. She noted that while previous influential theorists of totalitarianism each had their own unique focus - such as, for example, Arendt's emphasis on the role of ideology and terror - they all saw totalitarianism as the 'obliteration' of the 'distinction between public and private' and as attempt to claim 'for the state the whole life of the whole people' (Kirkpatrick, 1983, p. 98). This underpinned her distinction between traditional right-wing autocracies and revolutionary left-wing totalitarian ones. While traditional autocrats left the existing power structure in place, under left-wing totalitarianism the state attempted to reform all aspects of life.

Kirkpatrick's contribution to the totalitarianism debate, and her overtly political use of this concept, could be considered to constitute the flattening of the nuances of earlier theories of totalitarianism. This fact is important - it is indicative of the direction of uses of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century. Kirkpatrick's significance may have been minimised in scholarship on the Reagan era as the end of the Cold War disproved her arguments about the immutability of Soviet totalitarianism. She was therefore on the 'wrong side of history'. However, she was far from alone in making mistaken predictions about the permanence of the Cold War conflict. Kirkpatrick's influence over US foreign policy and her impact on totalitarianism discourse in the 1980s are clearly important on their own terms, and even more so because her ideas remain influential in contemporary conservative foreign policy circles. Conservative intellectuals, notably those associated with the magazine The American Interest, have recently advocated the reinvigoration of a 'Kirkpatrick Doctrine' to answer foreign policy problems in the present, and have also made use of her authoritarian/totalitarian distinction to diagnose totalitarian tendencies within the contemporary United States (Cornell, 2020) (Michta, 2020).

Kirkpatrick's influence was also apparent in the emerging field of human rights, which rose to unprecedented prominence in international relations in the 1970s (Moyn, 2010). She was a leading opponent of the Carter administration's human rights policy and participated in the reformulation of human rights discourse under Reagan into a profoundly instrumentalist doctrine which flowed naturally from the pursuit of the national interest. She argued that the 'nature of politics and the character of the United States alike guarantee' that human rights would be accorded a central role in foreign policy (Kirkpatrick, 1981, emphasis added). Kirkpatrick's work in forging a conception of human rights that was presented as fundamentally compatible with, or even indistinguishable from, the national interest found echoes in the debate over the role of strategic concerns in notionally humanitarian interventions in the 1990s. Kirkpatrick's emphasis on the dual elements of the 'strategic' and the 'moral' in US foreign policy would resurface in strikingly similar terms in the arguments of liberal hawks and George W. Bush-era 'neo-cons' after 2001. Like Kirkpatrick, Bush asserted that there was no need to choose between 'American ideals and American interest' because 'America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom - and gains the most when democracy advances' (quoted in Morefield, 2014, p. 2).

If on the one hand Kirkpatrick's work highlights continuities in US foreign policy discourse from the 1980s to the post-September 11 era, on the other hand her arguments are just as ill›uminating as to the diversity of foreign policy approaches encapsulated within 'neoconservatism'. In contrast to the hubristic idealism which characterised the policies of the 'third-age' 'neo-cons' of the second Bush administration, Kirkpatrick was a realist who emphasised the importance of caution and restraint in foreign affairs (Vaisse, 2010). Though she believed in the innate goodness of the United States, she also argued that '[f]acing the limits of our resources and our interests means giving up the illusion that we can solve all the world's problems, cure all the world's ills' (Kirkpatrick, 2017 [1988], p. 325). Her approach was thus very different from that of later neo-cons who embraced the unrestrained use of American power to reshape the world.

The dimensions of Kirkpatrick's thought highlighted here illustrate just some of the ways in which she was significant as an international thinker. In addition to her unprecedented influence as a woman active at the highest level of foreign policy decision-making and her direct impact, first as a public intellectual and then as a member of the administration, on Reagan's foreign policy, Kirkpatrick has also left a lasting impact on debates over totalitarianism, human rights, and realism and idealism in foreign policy.

References

Arendt, H. (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. with added prefaces. Orlando: Harcourt, p. 460-61.

Collier, P. (2012) Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick. New York: Encounter Books, p. 105.

Cornell, S. E. (2020) 'A New Kirkpatrick Doctrine: How Should America Deal with Authoritarian States?' The American Interest, Available at: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/03/13/how-should-america-deal-with-authoritarian-states/ (Accessed: 23/12/20).

Friedrich, C. J. and Brzezinski, Z. (1962[1956]), Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, p. 5.

Kirkpatrick, J.  (1981) "Human Rights and American Foreign Policy A Symposium," Commentary, Available at: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/human-rights-and-american-foreign-policy-a-symposium/. (Accessed: 23/12/20).

Kirkpatrick, J. (1983) 'Reflections on Totalitarianism', Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 98.

Kirkpatrick, J. (2017 [1988]) Legitimacy and Force: State Papers and Current Perspectives, vol. 1: Political and Moral Dimensions. London: Routledge, p. 325. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central.

Michta, A. A. (2020) 'The Captive Mind and America's Resegregation; Idol smashing and cancel culture are part of a broad ideological project to dominate society', Wall Street Journal (online), ProQuest.

Miller Morin, A. (1987) 'Interview with Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick', Library of Congress, Available at: http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000622 (Accessed: 23/12/20)

Moyn, S. (2010) The Last Utopia, Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 121-22.

Rosen, J. (1985) The Kirkpatrick Factor', New York Times, Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/magazine/the-kirkpatrick-factor.html (Accessed: 23/12/20).

Schmitz, D. F. (2006) The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 8.

Vaisse, J. Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weiner, T. (2006) 'Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Forceful Envoy, Dies', New York Times, Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/washington/09kirkpatrick.html (Accessed: 23/12/20).