Carter Was to Reagan What Buchanan Was to Lincoln

Former President Jimmy Carter died at the age of 100. As president, Jeane Kirkpatrick brilliantly explained, he was an abysmal failure. On his watch, the economic “misery index” skyrocketed and the geopolitical correlation of forces shifted in the Soviets’ favor. Nicaragua fell to the communist Sandinista regime. Iran fell to radical Islamic mullahs, setting the stage for decades of turbulence in the Middle East/Persian Gulf region, which included a lengthy and humiliating hostage crisis in which U.S. diplomats and staff were seized and imprisoned for 444 days. The Soviet Union sponsored global terror networks, used Cuban proxies to spread turmoil in Central America and the Caribbean Sea and Africa, invaded Afghanistan, and attained a theoretical strategic nuclear first-strike capability. Americans registered their verdict at the polls in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won a landslide electoral college victory (489 to 49), winning 44 of the 50 states.

Carter left Reagan with a domestic economic crisis and an America that was on the geopolitical defensive, but Reagan turned things around. His across-the-board tax cuts stimulated the economy, and his defense build-up and global political-subversive warfare put the Soviet Union on the defensive and ultimately on the road to dissolution. Soviet gains in the Cold War were reversed. Iran released the American hostages on the day Reagan took office. The Sandinista regime lost power to U.S.-supported democratic forces. The Caribbean island of Grenada was liberated from communist rule. Reagan’s strategy of “we win, they lose” replaced Carter’s message that we were free of an “inordinate fear” of communism. Reagan won the Cold War that Jimmy Carter was losing.

That is why, historically, Carter was to Reagan what James Buchanan was to Abraham Lincoln. Buchanan (who served as president between 1857 and 1861), like Carter, left his successor a mess — a country headed towards civil war. Buchanan, like Carter, watched and did very little as events moved the country toward crisis. Both men surrendered to events instead of seeking to master those events as Lincoln and Reagan did.

Buchanan did nothing to convince Southerners that he would do what was necessary to save the Union. Lincoln repeatedly stated that he would save the Union at any cost (including letting slavery exist) and then as president acted decisively and ruthlessly to save the Union. Carter did nothing to convince the Soviets that he would do what was necessary to win the Cold War. Reagan repeatedly stated that the Soviet Union was illegitimate and doomed to failure (“the ash heap of history”) and defeat, and he courageously acted to subvert Soviet rule in the empire and within the Soviet Union itself. Buchanan appeased the Confederacy. Carter appeased the Soviet empire. Lincoln relentlessly waged total war against the Confederacy. Reagan relentlessly waged “cold war” by exploiting Soviet economic and political vulnerabilities. Lincoln freed an entire race of people and put an end to the “evil empire” of slavery. Reagan freed half of a continent and put an end to the “evil empire” that had enslaved Russia and nations of central and eastern Europe for more than a half-century. (RELATED: Dec. 26, 1991: The Soviet Union Officially Dissolves)

Neither Buchanan nor Carter was up to those respective challenges. RIP.

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