Free Markets, Human Rights, and Global Power

Abstract

Under the banner of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), in the 1970s a coalition of developing countries forced the U.S. and other rich nations to revisit the terms of the post-World War II economic settlement through comprehensive global negotiations. This dissertation argues that this economic showdown reshaped U.S. foreign policy and made global inequality a major threat to American national security. Using newly available sources from presidential libraries, the personal papers of cabinet members and ambassadors, and interviews with former National Security Council officials, it demonstrates how the NIEO and accompanying “North-South dialogue” negotiations became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of the 1970s, including the end of “Golden Age” liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the role of human rights in foreign policy. U.S. policy debates and decisions in the North-South dialogue, it concludes, were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that would form the core of America’s post-Cold War foreign policy.