Dictators who receive help from America are getting away without any pressure to reform.
Forty years ago this week the Helsinki Final Act, a diplomatic masterpiece, showed how it could be done. It helped to defuse the Cold War, appeared to give the Soviet bloc the security it craved but, by setting up a mechanism to scrutinise human rights, gave legitimacy to dissident groups who started to subvert communism from within. “If you open that Pandora’s Box, you never know what Trojan’ horses will jump out,” as the former foreign secretary Ernie Bevin once had it.