Throughout most of the twentieth century, the United States supported right-wing dictatorships in the name of stability, trade, and anticommunism. Authoritarian regimes promised to maintain order, prevent revolution, and protect American investments and access to markets. This violation of America's political ideals was justified by the argument that non-Western European people were unprepared for self-government and that democratic governments in Third World nations would be weak and unstable, making these countries open to radical ideas and communist insurgencies that promised quick solutions to their problems. American policymakers, therefore, defended their actions by asserting that they had been taken in the name of freedom; right-wing dictatorships were necessary evils that would serve as antidotes to political unrest, bulwarks against communism, and conduits for modernization.

While American support for right-wing dictatorships was always morally questionable, racist assumptions, the desire for stability, fear of revolution, and the Cold War trumped the promotion of freedom and human rights that the United States claimed it was protecting when it came to American policy. It was only with the cracking of the Cold War consensus during the Vietnam War that the issues of democracy, human rights, and the types of government to which the United States provided aid entered into the public debates over foreign policy. The opposition to the Vietnam War, and the revelations of covert activities by the Church Committee, brought new voices into the making of American foreign policy.