The legacy of President Jimmy Carter

In June 1994, the United States and North Korea were on the brink of war, according to many observers at the time. Bilateral negotiations on Pyongyang’s nuclear program were at an impasse. The North was threatening to expel inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and it had resumed nuclear activities it had suspended while talks were underway. The Bill Clinton administration was pushing for United Nations sanctions, which North Korea said it would regard as an act of war, and Washington was actively considering Pentagon plans for a preemptive military attack against the North’s Yongbyon nuclear site and for beefing up U.S. military forces on the Korean Peninsula to prepare for a possible war.

Alarmed that the situation was heading toward armed conflict, Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang for two days of meetings with Kim Il Sung, founder of the North Korean regime and grandfather of its current leader, Kim Jong Un. Several senior Clinton administration officials were not pleased with the former president’s intervention, but he was determined to go.

Administration concerns—especially that Carter’s personal diplomacy might not be demanding enough and could undercut prospects for a stronger deal—were only heightened when Carter, while still in Pyongyang, surprised Washington by announcing on CNN that he had reached an agreement that would freeze North Korea’s nuclear program. Pressed by the White House in an urgent, late-night phone call, Carter sought some additional commitments, which he said Kim Il Sung agreed to.

Carter’s unauthorized involvement in the North Korean nuclear issue ruffled some feathers. But it got official negotiations back on track, which a few months later converted the general framework he worked out with Kim Il Sung into a more rigorous arrangement, known as the Agreed Framework, for restricting Pyongyang’s nuclear program. And it arrested the downward spiral that could well have led to a devastating armed conflict.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency was consequential for the U.S. relationship with India. On the one hand, he helped ties recover from the nadir of the Richard Nixon years. The administration saw India as a “regional influential,” declaring it “the leader of South Asia.” Carter himself had a positive view of India, shaped in no small part by his mother’s experience there as a Peace Corps volunteer and by its people’s commitment to democracy. He began a regular correspondence with Prime Minister Morarji Desai on a range of issues and visited India during his first year in office—the only American president until Barack Obama in 2010 who didn’t twin it with a visit to Pakistan. The administration also suggested consultations on the Indian Ocean and reviving defense (especially naval) cooperation. And it navigated congressional objections to get a nuclear fuel shipment to India approved, even though it failed to achieve its objective of persuading India to agree to full-scope safeguards vis-à-vis its nuclear reactors.

On the other hand, despite Carter’s desire to see India in its own right and not just as a subset of U.S.-Soviet competition, the Cold War created complications in India-U.S. ties that would only increase during the Reagan administration. Carter’s normalization of ties with China came at a time when New Delhi and Beijing were undertaking their own rapprochement, but it nonetheless raised concerns in India about the implications for Indian security, the potential sale of dual-use American equipment to China, and the possibility of Washington looking the other way if Beijing took adverse actions in Asia. Critically, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a Carter U-turn on his administration’s tough approach to Pakistan, with Washington once again strengthening India’s other rival for American strategic objectives. In that sense, the Carter years were reflective of a broader India-U.S. trend—that even if bilateral ties are on stable ground, Washington’s (and New Delhi’s) broader prism and priorities can be more crucial in determining the possibilities and limits of the relationship.

On December 31, 1977, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then the shah of Iran, extolled the “unshakable” ties between his country and the United States at a state dinner in Tehran for President Jimmy Carter. In response, Carter lauded the two leaders’ friendship and described his visit as “a good harbinger of things to come—that we could close out this year and begin a new year with those in whom we have such great confidence and with whom we share such great responsibilities for the present and for the future.”

Thirteen months later, the Pahlavi regime crumbled under mounting pressure from a mass revolution led by an inchoate coalition of liberals, leftists, and Muslim clerics, and the shah fled his country. Iran’s revolution shattered its deep partnership with Washington, reconfigured the geostrategic landscape in the Middle East, and ultimately doomed Carter’s reelection prospects.

The revolution took Washington by surprise, though it should not have. The rumblings of political alienation and economic dislocation were long evident, but U.S. policymakers could not contemplate “thinking the unthinkable,” as the last U.S. ambassador to Tehran described the prospect of the shah’s overthrow, until it was too late. Given the monarchy’s immense resources and vast security infrastructure, the rapidity of its collapse was breathtaking.

Coming on the heels of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the revolution catalyzed an urgent reconsideration of U.S. posture in the broader Middle East that ultimately drew Washington into the Middle East in increasingly thorny ways. The Carter Doctrine, articulated by the president in his 1980 State of the Union speech, asserted that America would defend its interests in the Persian Gulf by force if necessary. Subsequent administrations built the capabilities to deliver on this commitment and deployed them repeatedly, at great cost in strategic, human, and financial terms.

For Americans watching scenes of Iran’s upheaval on the nightly news, it compounded the sense of disarray and futility surrounding America’s role in the world, which had remained potent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The revolution’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, often declared that “America cannot do a damned thing,” a statement seemingly confirmed by Iran’s abrupt transformation from a reliable U.S. security partner and hub for U.S. investment to a seethingly anti-American regime. “We used to run this country,” a U.S. diplomat commented bitterly in February 1979. “Now we don’t even run our own embassy.”

These words proved shockingly prescient. In November 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun by protesters, and its personnel were taken hostage, opening a 444-day ordeal that foreshadowed the excruciating challenges posed by hostage-taking by Tehran and its proxies. Khomeini described the embassy takeover as “Iran’s second revolution,” since it handily sidelined moderate forces in the interim government and expedited the consolidation of clerical rule. It also precipitated an enduring rupture with Washington, which initially sought a relationship with the post-revolutionary leadership.

Although the historical record offers a much more complex dissection of U.S. decisionmaking on Iran, the blame for the quagmire in Iran fell squarely on Carter, especially after an April 1980 mission intended to rescue the hostages ended catastrophically. The ordeal weighed heavily on the president himself, and Tehran added salt to the wounds with the release of the hostages in the minutes after the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Ultimately, Carter himself reflected on this episode with his typical sangfroid, noting that “Iran was not ours to lose in the first place.”

Jimmy Carter inherited the White House, and with it oversight of the Department of Defense, at a difficult time in American history and global politics—considerably worse than today, in my eyes. We had just lost the Vietnam War. We had had an additional travesty under President Gerald R. Ford with the botched Mayaguez hostage rescue effort in Cambodia in May 1975. The newly-created all-volunteer American military, something most citizens take considerable pride in today, was a hollow and often drug-infested institution with low morale; back in those days, everyone thought the Israeli military was much better than the U.S. Armed Forces (and they may have been right). Deterrence was holding in Europe, but Soviet nuclear and conventional military buildups were moving ahead with full steam. The Nixon/Kissinger opening to China provided one bright spot, but soon, on Carter’s watch and for reasons going far beyond anything he could control, the overthrow of the shah in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan plunged the world into a state of danger that had not been witnessed since perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 

To be sure, Carter deserved some blame for some of the mistakes. He was wrongheaded to think about pulling U.S. forces out of Korea early in his presidency, given the weakening of deterrence that could have resulted; his admirable focus on human rights led him not to prioritize military spending adequately (it would be up to Ronald Reagan to fix that); the tragic Iran hostage rescue attempt of spring 1980 was a testament to not only American military dysfunction but problems in the chain of command for which Carter was ultimately accountable (not until the Goldwater-Nichols-Nunn reforms of 1986 would those problems be properly addressed).

But Carter made a huge contribution to defense policy nonetheless—and it is one that we at Brookings, with our close ties to William J. Perry over the decades, take special pride in. Under Perry, responsible for defense technology research and innovation at the Pentagon in those years, as well as Secretary of Defense Harold Brown—also a physicist and a visionary—the Department of Defense and many associated institutions as well as industry leaders created the basis for huge technological progress in the American armed forces. Reagan would provide the money to buy the resulting weapons; Operation Desert Storm in 1991 would demonstrate just how much the various reforms, modernization efforts, and improvements to pay and readiness had turned the U.S. military around since the Vietnam era. The breakthroughs brought about by Carter, Brown, and Perry were in various areas of science and technology—stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and other precision-strike ordnance like the Harpoon, Hellfire, Maverick, Javelin, and Stinger (in their various manifestations and upgrades). Among other signature systems, the progress of that four-year period contributed enormously to the Army’s “big five” modernization agenda of the 1980s (the Abrams tank, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot air and missile defense system) and the F-117 stealth fighter as well as the B-2 bomber.

Perhaps it was only appropriate that under Carter, himself an engineer, the U.S. Department of Defense arguably assembled its most technologically sophisticated and innovative leadership team in the 77-year history of the organization to date.

When it comes to human rights, President Jimmy Carter achieved two notable feats. First, he brought a broad concept of universal human rights, including economic and social rights, to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy and did so at the height of the Cold War, when realist notions of national security were preeminent. Second, he persisted in pushing human rights as a national priority both during and after his presidency, despite its limitations in practical policy terms during his term and ever since.

A deeply religious man, Jimmy Carter infused a renewed sense of moral purpose into U.S. foreign policy, an important pivot from the disastrous effects of the Vietnam War and Watergate. His first inaugural address in 1977 sought to marry his idealism with a strategic vision toward allies and opponents: “Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for these societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights.” His administration then proceeded quickly to criticize human rights violations in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Uganda and supported sanctioning countries with abusive records, such as Rhodesia.

That same year, Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance articulated a set of principles and policies that would eventually become Presidential Directive 30, a blueprint for how the U.S. government would promote human rights. The State Department quickly stood up a new bureau for human rights and humanitarian affairs which began issuing public country reports on human rights. The National Security Council under Zbigniew Brzezinski established the first interagency working group to integrate human rights into foreign assistance and other decisions. These and many other actions created a formal framework and bureaucracy to elevate human rights that have endured and expanded for decades.

Inevitably, Carter’s high purposes faced significant tradeoffs in cases where the perceived need to contain the USSR and other adversaries overrode the call for justice he personally and politically embraced. One tragic example: Archbishop Oscar Romero’s forsaken pleas to Carter in February 1980 to ban military aid to the Salvadoran junta, shortly before a death squad, led by a U.S.-trained officer, assassinated him. Nonetheless, his lifelong commitment to protect and champion human rights defenders around the world, which I witnessed first-hand at the Carter Center, demonstrates his steadfast pursuit of what he once called America’s “historical birthright” to advance the universal demand for fundamental human rights.

The Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 are the most important dimensions of President Jimmy Carter’s legacy. He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in this historic breakthrough, and rightly so. But it is important to bear in mind that the Carter administration’s initial response to President Anwar Sadat’s decision to go to Jerusalem was chilly. The New York Times wrote at the time that it could freeze the water of the Nile.

This initial response derived from the fact that Sadat’s decision to seek an essentially separate peace with Israel ran counter to the administration’s original approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Inspired by a 1975 Brookings task force’s report entitled “Towards Peace in the Middle East,” the White House sought a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict which meant the convening of an international conference, cooperation with the Soviet Union, and the allocation of an important role to Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The president and his team believed that Israel should withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and that a Palestinian state should be established. In return, Israel would be given peace and diplomatic recognition. This was not acceptable to Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and to his successor, Menachem Begin. Sadat could not understand why the United States was bringing the Soviet Union back to the Middle East nor was he willing to give Syria and the PLO a veto over his policies. A common objection to Washington’s policy played a major role in leading Sadat and Begin to cooperate.

To his credit, Carter understood that if Egypt and Israel resolved to make peace, he should help rather than criticize it; he played an essential role in overcoming numerous hurdles and in making it happen.

The Camp David agreements were undoubtedly Jimmy Carter’s biggest accomplishment in diplomacy. And he had to do it twice: first in September 1978 at the presidential retreat in Maryland and then again shuttling in the region when the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty seemed destined for failure in March 1979. It was Carter’s stubborn refusal to give up that made the treaty a reality. It was very much a personal achievement.

The treaty has prevented a full-scale Arab-Israel war for four decades now and effectively eliminated the existential threat to the survival of Israel. In doing so it also reduced the incentive for Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians. Carter spent much of his time after the White House promoting the Palestinian cause, to little avail, probably out of remorse about the treaty’s failure to bring a comprehensive peace. He was often very critical of Israel. Less well known is that Carter’s administration also set in process the creation of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Carter was also the president who negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama despite the vociferous opposition of the American right wing led by Ronald Reagan. This probably averted a long guerrilla war that would have pitted the United States against all of Latin America and cost tens of thousands of lives. Today it is a forgotten triumph of his remarkable persistence in painstakingly gaining the support necessary in the Senate to ratify the treaty, which Reagan never challenged in his presidency.

Carter was the first world leader anywhere to recognize the problem of global warming. His administration issued multiple reports on the danger of climate change. He doubled the size of the National Park system.

Above all, Carter was a decent and honest man who routinely took on the hardest and most unpopular issues because that is what he believed was the president’s job. 

This is an adapted excerpt from an article that was published by Lawfare on January 14, 2021.

Jimmy Carter’s record on relations with the Soviets is complex. He came into office at a time of optimism, after Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had successfully pursued détente with Leonid Brezhnev, signing the first major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement, SALT I in 1972 and also the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Their détente policy was based on realpolitik, and they eschewed any talk of human rights with their Soviet counterparts.

Carter’s approach was considerably different. He, too, believed in the importance of arms control. After difficult negotiations, he and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979. But, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Senate refused to ratify it. Carter said the failure to ratify was “the most profound disappointment of my presidency.”

However, Carter and his administration were also deeply committed to supporting human rights around the world and they did not hesitate to criticize Soviet policies, much to the Kremlin’s annoyance. Unlike Kissinger, Carter had no qualms about discussing the plight of dissidents and Jewish refuseniks, and he recounts in his memoirs how Brezhnev became angry. Nevertheless, Carter denies that his human rights advocacy seriously affected his relations with the Soviets.

This dualistic approach to dealing with the Soviets was embodied in Carter’s top national security appointments. Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, was an anti-Soviet hawk. His secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, believed in traditional diplomacy. Where Brzezinski wanted to confront the Soviets, Vance sought dialogue and engagement.

By the time the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, U.S-Soviet relations had deteriorated considerably. Carter described the invasion as “the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War.”  His administration imposed a grain embargo on the USSR which Ronald Reagan, under pressure from American farmers, lifted in 1981. It also imposed technology sanctions. With Brzezinski’s enthusiastic support, it sent weapons to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin, Afghan fighters whose insurgency provided fertile ground for the emergence of al-Qaida. Carter also increased U.S. defense spending in response to what he believed was a growing Soviet threat. At this point, the Soviet leadership was an ailing gerontocracy, and the United States would have to wait until Gorbachev came to power to improve ties.

On foreign policy, Jimmy Carter’s legacy as president is forever tied to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in which his role was indispensable. The impact of the accords in reordering Middle East politics and America’s role in the region cannot be underestimated. But three important things about Carter’s role cannot be missed.

First, as I argued in a book on Camp David, Carter understood that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin certainly wanted an agreement with each other, but even more, they wanted to protect a special relationship with the United States. Second, Carter, often perceived by critics to be “soft” on foreign policy, used that understanding as a lever at Camp David and acted with toughness, without which an agreement could not have been concluded: When Begin was perceived to be an obstacle, Carter let it be known he was prepared to tell Americans Begin was to blame for failure; when Sadat packed his bags to abandon the talks, Carter did the same. Both men stayed and made further concessions. Third, after the agreement, Carter felt let down by Begin, believing he had violated a commitment to freeze Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Carter thought was essential.

Certainly, Egypt gained by recovering the Sinai and ending a state of war. But Israel was a big winner in decoupling Egypt’s military weight from other issues, especially the Palestinian issue. The impact was immediately evident: It’s improbable, for instance, that Begin would have ordered the 1982 invasion of Lebanon without peace with Egypt.

It is clear that Carter viewed the Camp David Accords as good for the United States, Israel, and Egypt. However, he also saw the component in the accords that focused on Palestinians as a step toward their freedom, and worried over the years that the accords were being taken for granted. As he said in 2018 marking the 40th anniversary at Camp David: “I admit a lingering disappointment … While Israeli-Egyptian peace was essential, I always believed that the Palestinian issue was fundamental to achieving a comprehensive peace in the region—and for Israel to survive as a democratic state.”

This sense of unfinished business and concern that his major accomplishment could be exploited to maintain and exacerbate injustice may help explain Carter’s outspoken posture in defense of Palestinian rights in the years since, risking a storm in 2006 in publishing his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”