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I vividly remember from my service in the Reagan administration the fear and apoplexy of senior State Department officials when President Reagan delivered his "Evil Empire" speech about the Soviet Union. (Not by accident, the speech was delivered at the annual meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals.) State Department critics of the speech labeled its truth-telling premise (and the audience before whom it was delivered) with the same "cowboy" and "machismo" pejoratives with which Seiple labels those who have raised the religious persecution issue to its current place on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Yet as we know authoritatively from senior officials of the former Soviet Union, Reagan's truth-telling was a decisive means by which the regime was brought down.

Likewise, President Bush's "Axis of Evil" designation of North Korea—viewed with equal horror by "engagement" enthusiasts like Seiple—has placed in the dock, for the first time in years, a Stalinist regime that treats possession of Bibles as a criminal offense meriting life (and as frequently death) sentences in gulags of unrivaled savagery. The regime's blustering response to the President, while raising understandable fears of a U.S.-North Korea confrontation, is in fact a clear sign of its desperation, clear evidence that it knows that the spotlight shined by the President on its conduct ensures that its days are numbered.

Seiple's professed discomfort with what he calls a "punishing approach" toward tyrannies is also belied by the success of the movement on which the Religious Freedom Act was modeled—the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism of the '60s and '70s led by Sen. Henry Jackson. U.S. Jewish and Christian leaders energized that campaign.

The movement visited real "punishment" against a Soviet Union with far greater capacity to impose reciprocal punishments on the United States than countries like Sudan and North Korea ever will have. Its signature feature, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, banned trade and other forms of normalization with the former Soviet Union as long as it forbade Jewish dissidents to emigrate from its borders. That demand jeopardized the Soviet regime's core internal security policy of walling its subjects in.

Yet, in dramatic refutation of the punishments-don't-work claim, a seemingly all-powerful Soviet Union let my people go, and Sen. Jackson's faith in the efficacy of speaking truth to power was proven correct. Moreover, the freedom given to the Soviet Union's vulnerable Jewish community also caused cracks to develop in walls the regime had built around artists, political dissidents, and Christians.

In light of that history, it seems strange for Seiple to regard the Religious Freedom Act's requirement to suspend U.S. aid (and only non-humanitarian aid at that) to persecuting regimes as a "punishing" and inevitably counterproductive policy. Under the Act, the President may even waive the suspension of aid.

Seiple's views track the Clinton administration's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger's "fundamental concern" with the key premises of the Religious Freedom Act and the movement that brought it into being. According to Berger, "automatic and public censure" of persecuting regimes will:

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March 2003, Vol. 47, No. 3