CNN
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Early in his presidency in May 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, outlining a new approach to America’s role in the world. President Carter said human rights “should be a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.” ”
This was a major departure from the foreign policy practiced by President Carter’s predecessor, President Richard Nixon. During the Vietnam War, President Nixon intensified America’s covert bombing of Vietnam’s neighbors Cambodia and Laos, causing untold misery to these countries. Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger successfully pushed for the overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Three years later, Kissinger also secretly gave the go-ahead to Argentina’s military government to implement what was called a “military regime.” Killing between 10,000 and 30,000 political opponents in a “dirty war.”
President Carter wanted to bring peace to the Middle East and at the same time end America’s support for dictators and emphasize America’s support for human rights. His record largely reflects this effort, although the Iran hostage crisis tended to obscure the extent to which Mr. Carter was a successful foreign policy commander.
Within weeks of taking office, Carter wrote a letter of support to Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s leading dissident. This infuriated the Soviet regime, but it helped sustain the opposition movement within the Soviet Union, knowing that it had the US president firmly in its corner.
Mr. Carter’s rights and justice-based approach to American foreign policy also influenced his decision to return the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. More than half a century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt supported Panama’s separation from Colombia, which would have resulted in Americans building and owning a canal across Panama that would have allowed ships to reach the bottom of the South. There would be no need to travel thousands of additional miles around one Cape Horn. America.
But by the time Carter took office, the Panama Canal had become a symbol of American colonialism. Mr. Carter was determined to right what he saw as a historical wrong, even if it was not a particularly popular move politically in the United States. Polls showed that half of Americans didn’t want to give up the canal, and an up-and-coming Republican politician named Ronald Reagan said of the plan: ”
But in the end, Carter won, gaining the two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate needed to ratify the Panama Canal Treaty.
In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has publicly considered returning the Panama Canal, saying that the U.S. Senate has ratified the Panama Canal Treaty and that the Panamanian government has no interest in returning the canal to the United States. Therefore, the possibility of this happening seems quite remote.
peace between israel and egypt
Another of Mr. Carter’s successes was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, who fought three major wars against each other. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat engaged in 13 days of intensive peace negotiations in September 1978, when President Carter led them to the US President’s retreat at Camp David, Maryland. There was a hostile relationship at the time.
At Camp David, Mr. Carter demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of Middle East issues by placating the leaders of Israel and Egypt and persuading them to continue negotiations even if they broke down.
James Fallows was President Carter’s chief speechwriter and stayed at Camp David during the negotiations. Fallows said the peace agreement would not have happened without Carter, and that Carter focused a lot on the details of the negotiations. Carter sat down with Begin and Sadat and studied a map of the Sinai region between Egypt and Israel. Carter “was drawing the line and saying, ‘How about this?'” And does the road lead here? So what will happen to the water supply? ’ So he was able to explain it in more detail than anyone else,” Fallows told me in an interview on Audible’s “In the Room” podcast.
The resulting peace agreement still stands today, almost half a century later.
Although it was Nixon who first visited China to begin the normalization process between the communist regime and the United States, diplomatic relations between the two countries formally recognized China and laid the foundation for the largest trade partnership in history. It was Carter who established the relationship. .
And despite his pacifist image, it was Carter who, in December 1979, began arming the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union, which had invaded the country.
But for most Americans, it was the Iran hostage crisis, in which Islamic revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran with more than 50 Americans, that defined Carter’s record as commander in chief.
The impetus for the embassy occupation was that the United States offered refuge to the Shah of Iran, whom Iranian revolutionaries hated. Ironically, while Carter was initially vehemently opposed to the Shah’s entry into the United States, Kissinger and other Shah supporters warned him that the Shah was nearing death from cancer and urgently needed medical care that only the United States could provide. I was persuaded that it was necessary. (In fact, Shah’s medical prognosis was better than was offered at the time).
President Carter authorized a rescue operation to free American hostages in Tehran in April 1980. Operation Eagle Claw, also known as Desert One, was doomed as soon as it began. Eight American service members were killed when several rescue helicopters encountered a severe sandstorm and one of them collided with an American transport plane while refueling in the Iranian desert.
A Pentagon investigation found a number of problems with Operation Eagle Claw. The Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps all wanted to play a role in this important operation, even though they had never worked together on this type of mission before. The focus on operational security prevented critical information from being shared between services and serious planning rehearsals.
Something needed to be fixed. This amendment was the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command in 1980, which would oversee the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 31 years later. But the protracted hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days, and the failure of the rescue mission in Iran ensured that Carter would remain in office for only one term.
At a 2015 press conference, Carter was asked what he wished he had done differently when he was president. Carter replied, “I wish I had sent another helicopter to rescue the hostages. That would have rescued them and I would have been reelected.”
That seems like wishful thinking. The challenge of rescuing 52 American hostages held by fanatical revolutionaries inside the U.S. embassy in downtown Tehran, a city with a population of several million million people, and safely escaping the country was no mean feat. There probably wasn’t.
However, Carter’s accomplishments as commander-in-chief cannot be judged solely by the American hostages held in Iran and the failure to rescue them.
Carter brokered a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel, opened diplomatic relations with China and the United States, ended the colonial-era stimulus of U.S. control of the Panama Canal, and, for example, while supporting Soviet dissidents. He has brought human rights to the fore in U.S. policy, sometimes taking a hard-line stance. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Overall, this is a successful record for any commander-in-chief.
