Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick: scholar diplomat, and patriot.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.
• Position: Obituary

Editor's Note:

In his praise of Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the author highlights her contributions to U. S. national security during an earlier period in which the American spirit seemed to flag. Challenged anew, Americans might well draw inspiration from her courageous defense of liberty.--Contrib. Ed.

Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, a brilliant scholar, forceful diplomat, and consequential policymaker, died on December 8, 2006, at the age of 80. Kirkpatrick was a lifelong Democrat who saw her Party in the 1970s move away from the hardheaded, realistic foreign policies pursued by postwar Democratic Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. The traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, which followed the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, left the national Democratic Party increasingly influenced and sometimes led by Cold War revisionists, appeasers, and proponents of a weak-willed version of detente with our Soviet adversaries.

When Jimmy Carter, a southern Democrat, won the presidency in 1976, Kirkpatrick and other Democratic cold warriors hoped that the Party might begin to reclaim its traditional Cold War internationalist approach to the world. Carter had campaigned as a conservative Democrat, and four years before he had spoken at the Democratic National Convention on behalf of Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, a hawkish, anti-communist Democrat (and friend of Kirkpatrick). Those hopes were soon dashed, however, when in his first major foreign policy address, Carter proclaimed that the United States was now free of its "inordinate fear of communism" that once led us to embrace any dictator who offered to help us contain communism. Carter publicly discussed removing U.S. forces from South Korea, resulting in the public protest by, and resignation of, a U.S. military commander. The long-planned deployment of new weapons systems, both conventional and nuclear, was delayed or eliminated during the early years of the administration. And in a devastating blow to the morale of our armed forces, Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers.

Carter launched a "human rights" campaign that publicly scolded our authoritarian allies, such as the Shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Somoza regime, but treaded more lightly when dealing with communist China and the Soviet Union. When both the Shah and Somoza came under increasing attack by internal opposition forces, Carter did nothing to support those longtime allies, and both fell from power with no effective U.S. response.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinista communist movement, aided by Cuba and the Soviet Union, soon took power and established a new Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere, a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine.

In Iran, the Shah, who helped protect U.S. interests in the vitally important Persian Gulf region, was soon replaced by radical Islamic clerics...