As James Fallows’ blog makes clear, President Obama’s human rights effort in China was more nuanced, and probably more successful, than people unfamiliar with China and Asia more generally can easily gauge.  The question is whether human rights have a permanent foothold in U.S. foreign policy.

Right now our human rights strategy seems a little scattershot at a time when countries around the world are restricting rights.  Today Sharon LaFraniere has a striking report in the New York Times about Chinese activist Huang Chi, who criticized China’s building construction standards following the Sichuan Province earthquake.  He has been sentenced to three years in jail on a state secrecy charge.  In Iran, as Robert Worth reports in the Times, a new campaign is underway to indoctrinate school children to the values of the 1978 religious revolution, including the placement of Basiji enforcer squads in schools.

The USSR increased its oppression of human rights activists as its leadership began to ossify and its economy to decline.  Vocal American support, including from U.S. presidents, was an important reason for the survival of the oppressed Soviet human rights community and the subsequent emergence, though short-lived, of vibrant democratic reforms in post-1991 Russia.

Yesterday, as Jeff Zeleny and Celia Dugger report in the Times (once again the Times), President Obama castigated Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, for continued human rights abuses and dictatorial behavior.  He offered a group of Zimbabwean female dissidents stirring and inspiring words, saying that “they can sap a dictator’s strength with their own.”

Progress on human rights can’t be pushed with equal force in every country America deals with, and people outside government’s inner circles will never know all the calculations involved in determining a human rights strategy.  But history shows that when U.S. presidents talks about human rights, overall it helps those who are trying to achieve them.  President Obama and his foreign policy team should accentuate rights rhetoric as much as possible and in as many places as possible.  These aren’t just words — they are powerful tools of a foreign policy that can have effects long after the present administration is gone.

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