Jimmy Carter and the Resurrection of U.S. Empire

Every foreign-policy remembrance of Jimmy Carter I have seen has focused on the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran, and on the Camp David accord, which re-established diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. Camp David did much to bring Anwar Sadat’s Egypt back into the Western fold, but, as later history would bear out, the accord did little if anything to improve the lives of Palestinians. If anything, it gave Israel political cover for its ongoing savagery of the Palestinian people.

And there has been some mention of Carter’s support for the Afghan Mujahideen fighting the ill-fated 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

But there was another, arguably more consequential foreign policy area for which Carter has received far less scrutiny.

Carter was elected president in 1976, only one year after the United States suffered the first military defeat in its 200-year history. And it suffered that defeat at the hands of Vietnam, whose per capita GDP was, in 1975, a mere 1.06% of the U.S. figure. Vietnam shouldn’t have had a chance against the most powerful empire in world history. 

That stunning military loss was glossed over by ubiquitous and joyous media coverage of former prisoners of war being reunited on airport tarmacs with their families after years of detention in Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps. It was as if Vietnam were the offending party.

But while that media coverage did much to bolster perceived American righteousness, it did little to calm the nerves of a rattled empire.

Four years later, in 1979, under Carter, the U.S. suffered another setback when seemingly ragtag Iranian students seized 52 hostages from a United States in the throes of what U.S. media called “the Vietnam syndrome” – a post-Vietnam reluctance to assert power on the global stage.

On April 24, 1980, the Carter administration attempted a military rescue of the hostages. As in Vietnam, the military mission failed. Before the whole world. The emperor had no clothes.

But across the globe, in the Central American country of El Salvador, another foreign-policy challenge was catching fire. 

In 1980, five years after the U.S. loss in Vietnam, and three years into Carter’s only term, the U.S. empire faced its most consequential post-Vietnam challenge – and it wasn’t Israel-Egypt, or Iran.

In El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was challenging the murderous Salvadoran military, a recipient of U.S. military aid. In a land six percent the size of Vietnam, the FMLN was challenging the Monroe Doctrine, the United States’ self-proclaimed license to control Latin America.

That year, 1980, was a bloody year in El Salvador. 

On March 3 Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered. The day before he was murdered, Romero presided over a mass in a Carmelite chapel and made remarks that later proved haunting. Romero called on Salvadoran soldiers to, “in the name of God”, lay down their weapons and stop the slaughter of Salvadoran civilians. And the next day he was shot and killed in a hit ordered by Salvadoran Colonel Roberto D’Aubuisson.

On May 13 the Salvadoran military slaughtered 600 peasants in the Sumpul River, on the Honduras border. The peasants were fleeing a civil war that saw the FMLN control a third of the country. 

And on December 2, three American churchwomen – nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and layperson Jean Donovan – were raped and murdered by five members of the Salvadoran National Guard.

The churchwomen had dedicated their lives to helping refugees displaced by civil war in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. 

Finally, a slaughter that proved too much for U.S. appetites. 

U.S. military aid to El Salvador was halted, and the Carter administration was faced with perhaps the most consequential foreign-policy decision of its four-year tenure. Would the administration effectively shelve its on-paper human rights doctrine and resume military aid to obvious butchers, or would it re-assert U.S. power on the global stage after the crippling blows in Southeast Asia and Iran?

And it was the first real test of the left since its substantial contribution to the defeat of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia. 

In 1980 the left was just starting to organize against U.S. intervention in Central America. In the 26 years between Vietnam and the disastrous 2001 invasion of Iraq, the biggest movements among U.S. radicals and progressives were Central America and the fight against nuclear power.

It didn’t take long for Carter’s decision on resuming military aid to El Salvador. Three weeks after the rape and murder of the four U.S. churchwomen – and only four weeks before Carter left office – military aid to the Salvadoran butchers flowed once again.

Three weeks doesn’t sound like much, but it was at the time. Much of the country waited to see what Carter would do. Would Carter’s human rights pronouncements hold up under what was likely withering pressure from the domestic forces of empire?

Carter’s decision to resume military aid lay the groundwork for the United States’ disastrous Central America interventions of the 1980s, which almost brought down Ronald Reagan, the man who beat Carter in 1980.

After much pressure from constituents – organized by the left and U.S. churches – Congress finally rebelled against Reagan and cut off funding for the ongoing slaughter of Central Americans. But Reagan ignored the funding ban, and ensuing scandals almost brought down his administration. 

That decision by the Carter administration marked the re-assertion of U.S. power after the humiliating defeats in Vietnam and Iran. The Carter administration faced a fork in the road of U.S. history, and it chose power. It chose empire.

While it’s true that U.S. invincibility has never recovered from Vietnam, attempts at resurrecting it were inevitable. And it could have happened anywhere, at any time. But it happened in Central America. It happened in 1980. And it happened under Jimmy Carter. It spelled disaster for Central America, and it lay the groundwork for disastrous interventions in Angola, Mozambique, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Iraq and elsewhere. Empire was back.

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