December 1997
Planet Politics
Eldon Griffiths

Free Trade is a Human Right, Too

British tabloids were up in arms when a Saudi Arabian court found two English nurses guilty of murder. Deborah Parry, convicted of suffocating an Australian colleague in a military hospital, was sentenced to be executed in the Saudi fashion, beheading. Lucille McLauchlan, as an accessory, copped a prison sentence - plus 500 lashes.

"Barbaric," thundered Fleet Street, with scant thought for the original victim. "Don't let them behead Debbie," roared the Daily Express, once the foremost advocate of hanging in Britain. The British foreign secretary spoke darkly of "grave damage to Saudi-British relations."

Predictably, there was a compromise. Britain, after all, had its biggest single export deal at risk - an $18 billion contract for airplanes and missiles. This latest clash of Western opinion against the very different standards and values of other cultures raises, yet again, the vexed question of free trade versus sanctions against nations with "human rights" records of which we disapprove.

Forget the notion that we who live in democracies intrinsically are morally better than the Arabs and Asians. How long is it since English judges were sentencing children to death for stealing a loaf of bread? Or since courts in America's Deep South condemned escaping slaves to be hanged?

U.S. and British "human rights" policies are pretty selective, too, depending on time and country. When Iran was ruled by the shah, his police jailed thousands without trial and tortured many hundreds. Simultaneously, the U.S. and its allies sold him billions of dollars worth of modern weapons as we did to Mobutu's Zaire, Ceausescu's Romania, Samoza's Nicarague, and so on. Today, Iran is ruled by an equally harsh Islamic regime. But U.S. policy is exactly the opposite: sanctions, embargoes, even shooting down (by accident?) an Iranian airliner that was carrying far more pilgrims to Mecca than there were passengers aboard the ill-fated Pan Am flight 102, which was destroyed by a bomb over Scotland.

Balancing human rights against America's strategic necessities is vastly more difficult now that the Red Army no longer threatens us. Bill Clinton came to office condemning George Bush for "coddling dictators in China," but within a year he "delinked" U.S. trade from Chinese human rights because America cannot afford to exclude its exporters from the world's fastest growing big market. In North Korea, the U.S. is supplying the most detestable regime on earth with grain, oil, and a light-weight nuclear reactor because the alternative could well be Pyongyang's collapse and the destabilizing of South Korea through the influx of millions of hungry North Korean peasants across the 38th parallel.

International diplomacy, if it is to be effective, cannot be - and rarely is - constrained by the Ten Commandments.

Sir Alec Home, my former boss as British prime minister, was personally the most honorable public figure I've ever met' but Alec was right when he said, "In foreign policy I favor so much of a principle as will work." Morality, by contrast, is personal. I therefore lean towards those who believe that, broadly speaking, it's up to each company, each manager, each worker, to decide for himself or herself whether to trade with, invest in, or visit countries whose regimes we dislike.

On that basis, it's up to the state to make these decisions for us in only two main areas. One is in the matter of the export of lethal weapons. Individuals cannot determine which foreign regimes are the most likely sources of aggression or terrorism. Only the U.S. government has the resources and the intelligence on which to base such a judgment.

Then there is the issue of brutal regimes' mistreatment of their own people on their own territory. National sovereignty is rightly protected under international law. But could the U.S. stand idly by if, for instance, another Hitler were to launch a repeat of the Holocaust? The answer plainly is no, but preventing evil in other peoples' countries can only be achieved if free men are prepared to fight in foreign wars to enforce their own standards on others. Are Americans still willing to do this? If so, when and where?

Human rights, like compassion, ought to start at home. Before imposing sanctions on its foreign trade partners, the U.S. should weigh the effects on its own people. Sanctions that hurt U.S. workers more than they hurt the governments they're aimed at are no less an abridgment of basic American rights than the restrictions on civil liberty imposed by overseas despots. In cases such as Cuba and Iran, condemn their governments and deny them weapons, but let peaceful trade and private credits flow if individuals are prepared to risk it. Free trade is a human right, too.

Griffiths, a onetime foreign correspondent for both Time and Newsweek and a 27-year member of Britain's House of Commons, directs the Center for International Business at Chapman University in Orange, California.

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