Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy Was Not a Success

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Stuart Eizenstat contends that President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy was a success. “[D]uring his one term in office,” Eizenstat asserts, “Carter left an enduring and positive foreign policy legacy that few presidents who have served two can match.” Loyalty is a worthy virtue. Eisenstat was Carter’s domestic policy adviser, and Carter is reportedly in hospice care. But loyalty should not erase the historical record of foreign policy failures that caused even many Democrats to abandon Carter and their party to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Jimmy Carter was one of the worst foreign policy presidents in our nation’s history.

Eizenstat devotes much of his article to one of Carter’s few foreign policy successes: the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. But, as Steven Hayward has pointed out, “[w]hile Carter could justly claim Camp David as a major foreign policy triumph, it was also in the Middle East where the greatest shipwreck of his foreign policy, and ultimately his presidency, took place: Iran.” We are today still suffering from Carter’s ill-advised policies toward that country. Iran under the shah was a strategic asset of American foreign policy, helping to police the vital Persian Gulf. The shah, for all of his faults, was a reliable U.S. ally for 25 years until the Carter administration’s indecisiveness led to his downfall and, more importantly, the rise of the first radical Islamic state in the region — a revolutionary clerical regime devoted to spreading Islam throughout the region, and perhaps beyond. It was the beginning of what Norman Podhoretz called “World War IV.” Podhoretz explained it in these terms:

We are once again up against a truly malignant totalitarian enemy. In World War II, the totalitarian challenge to the liberal democratic world … came from the Right; in World War III [the Cold War] it came from the Left. Now, in World War IV, it comes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century, that was schooled politically at the feet of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth, that went on to equip itself with the technologies of the twenty-first, and that is now striving mightily to arm itself with the weaponry of the twenty-first as well.

The roots of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on our country, the lengthy and mishandled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the debacles of the Arab Spring, Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon, and the current war between Israel and Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah can be broadly traced to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which occurred on Jimmy Carter’s watch and which he did nothing to prevent.

The dangerous flaws of Carter’s foreign policy were brilliantly exposed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, a long-time Democrat, in a November 1979 article in Commentary titled “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” Her first two sentences announced the theme of the essay:

The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent. In the thirty-odd months since the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as President there has occurred a dramatic Soviet buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas.

Kirkpatrick went on to explore the disastrous policies and the intellectual source of those policies, which led to the rise of an anti-American Islamic regime in Iran and a communist dictatorship aligned to Cuba and the Soviet Union in Nicaragua. She compared it to the flawed policies of the late 1940s that led to the fall of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and its replacement by Mao’s communist regime in China.

In his first major foreign policy address at the University of Notre Dame in May 1977, Carter announced to the world that the United States was “now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” “Human rights” would be the cornerstone of Carter’s foreign policy. Eizenstat in his Foreign Affairs piece praised Carter’s commitment to “human rights,” but as Kirkpatrick pointed out in her Commentary article, the human rights situation was far worse for the people of Iran under the Islamic clerics, and far worse for the people of Nicaragua under the Ortega brothers. Carter’s human rights policy was an utter failure. 

Carter’s approach to the Soviet military buildup and geopolitical offensive around the world for a time shifted what the Soviets called the “correlation of forces” in their favor until the Reagan administration abandoned Carter’s flaccid detente policy (which included cutting the defense budget, canceling weapons systems, promoting arms control, and announcing a pullout of U.S. forces from South Korea) and replaced it with a geopolitical offensive strategy that in the end helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. To be sure, as Eizenstat notes, Carter — after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, under pressure from the few remaining Democratic hawks in Washington, like Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and Carter’s own national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who previously lost out in policy disputes to the dovish Secretary of State Cyrus Vance), and with a view to the upcoming election — reversed course somewhat by proposing defense increases, sending aid to the Afghan rebels, and announcing the so-called Carter Doctrine to ensure the continued flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, but by then the damage had been done. Carter’s efforts at arms control had opened what nuclear strategists called a “window of vulnerability” where the Soviets could theoretically threaten a strategic nuclear “first-strike” that could destroy most of our land-based missiles, as well as submarine and bomber bases, undermining the deterrent effect of our nuclear triad. His negotiated SALT II Treaty was dead on arrival in a Democratic-controlled Senate.

And, of course, there was the nightmarish humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis and the feeble, unsuccessful rescue attempt launched by the Carter administration that ended in tragedy. When all of those failures are weighed against the Camp David success, to claim that Carter left an enduring and positive foreign policy legacy is absurd. It is notable and telling that in response to Carter’s foreign policy failures, an unprecedented number of Democrats — some of whom worked on national security matters for Scoop Jackson — abandoned the Democratic Party and served with distinction in the Reagan administration. Many of those same Democrats in the years of Carter’s presidency had joined the Committee on the Present Danger, which alerted America to the growing Soviet threat and the Carter administration’s unwillingness to effectively meet that threat. The voters registered their opinion of Carter’s foreign and domestic policies by handing Reagan a landslide victory in 1980.

So, while one can wish Jimmy Carter a peaceful and comfortable end of life process and appreciate favorable words being written and said about him by those who worked for him when he was president, the historical record shows that he was one of the worst presidents in our nation’s history.

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