The foreign policy of Jimmy Carter Lowy Institute

Jimmy Carter, who died this week at the age of 100, pursued a remarkably ambitious and challenging foreign policy during his single term as US president. He came into office in early 1977 determined to transform America’s role in the world. The debacle in Vietnam, coupled with recent revelations of US covert meddling in other countries, suggested that the nation had become dangerously overextended abroad and had lost its way morally. Third world countries were now much more vocal in world affairs, and issues like global poverty, racial inequality, environmental degradation, and nuclear proliferation had come to the fore. Carter believed the United States should downplay its preoccupation with the Cold War and instead address these issues of common concern. His administration would work to reduce tensions with communist adversaries, lower America’s domineering profile, seek resolutions of festering international disputes, and promote human rights abroad.

As president, Carter made considerable headway in advancing this agenda. He elevated human rights as a key foreign policy concern, pressuring governments throughout the world, especially in Latin America, to release political prisoners and allow greater civic freedom. In 1977, his administration concluded two treaties with the government of Panama to permit the latter to exercise sovereignty over the Panama Canal, which the United States had controlled for more than six decades. In 1978 at Camp David, Carter brokered a stunning agreement between Egypt and Israel in which those two nations pledged to end three decades of war. In January 1979, the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – again, after 30 years of mutual estrangement – established full diplomatic relations. Months later, Carter and his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev, signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) II Treaty, imposing caps on the two nations’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Carter administration forthrightly opposed white minority rule in southern Africa, aiding Rhodesia’s transition to majority rule (and change of name to Zimbabwe) in 1979–80. The administration hardly ever considered military intervention in global trouble spots, and no US soldier died in combat on Carter’s watch.

In some cases, however, Carter’s foreign policy achievements contained less than met the eye or acquired a significance at odds with his original intentions. Many governments guilty of human rights abuses escaped US criticism, because relations with them raised other, overriding foreign policy considerations. The Camp David Agreement, though impressive on its own terms, was actually a disappointment to Carter. He had spent most of 1977 trying to broker a comprehensive settlement between Israel and all of its Arab enemies, including the Palestinians. But both Israel and Egypt preferred a bilateral peace process unencumbered by the participation of other Arab actors, and Carter had to oblige them. Because the resulting Camp David Accords left Israel in occupation of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese territory, it aroused bitter resentment throughout the Arab world, an outcome that pained Carter for decades thereafter.

So it went for America’s relations with its main communist adversaries. Carter had pursued rapprochement with China as a way of easing Cold War tensions across the board. The PRC and the Soviet Union were deeply hostile towards one another, and Carter hoped to follow a balanced policy of improving relations with both nations simultaneously. Instead, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s strongly anti-Soviet national security adviser, deliberately exploited the closer Sino-US ties to ratchet up anxieties in Moscow. In 1979, China waged a brief but bloody war against Soviet-aligned Vietnam, drawing only proforma criticism from the Carter administration. Not surprisingly, these events placed serious strain on US-Soviet relations. SALT II, meanwhile, fell short of Carter’s initial aspirations. The president favoured deep cuts in the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals. The Soviets, however, insisted on implementing a far more modest blueprint for arms limitation that they had negotiated with the previous administration of Gerald Ford, and Carter had to go along.

In 1979 and 1980, two developments, the Iranian Revolution and a further, much sharper deterioration in US-Soviet relations, dominated Carter’s foreign policy. Since the 1950s, the United States had staunchly backed Iran’s pro-Western shah, despite his terrible human rights record. By the time Carter became president, there was probably nothing he could have done to prevent the overthrow of the hated monarch, who was forced into exile in early 1979. The collapse of the Iranian regime was a serious strategic blow to the United States and its allies. In November 1979, after Carter allowed the ailing shah to enter the United States for medical treatment, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and detained scores of embassy employees, whom the new Iranian government held as hostages for more than a year. Just weeks after the embassy takeover, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan (a neighbour of both Iran and the Soviet Union) to prevent its Marxist government from being overthrown by Islamist rebels. The Soviets had blundered into a quagmire that in the coming decade would severely diminish their international and even their domestic power. At the time, however, Moscow appeared to have seized the initiative from a weakened and demoralised West.

Carter’s response to these challenges was a dramatic toughening of his foreign policy stance, in sharp contrast with his first two years in office. After the Iranian Revolution, his administration planned a build-up of US forces in the Persian Gulf region and concluded basing rights agreements with countries in the area. Once the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a move many feared presaged a further Soviet drive towards the Persian Gulf, Carter declared that intervention in the Gulf area by an outside power “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”, a statement that pundits dubbed the Carter Doctrine. The president asked Congress for a substantial increase in military spending, withdrew the SALT II Treaty from consideration by the Senate, and successfully pressured the US Olympic Committee to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games scheduled to take place in Moscow. Cold War tensions escalated dramatically. In April 1980, Carter authorised a military operation to rescue the hostages in Iran but aborted the effort in its early phases when, at a secret staging area in the Iranian desert, some of the US aircraft encountered technical difficulties. During the resulting evacuation, a helicopter collided with a transport plane, killing eight servicemen. Carter disclosed the tragedy to the nation and took responsibility for it.

Citing these foreign policy setbacks, and promising an even harder line against America’s foreign foes, former California Governor Ronald Reagan decisively defeated Carter in the 1980 election. The lame duck president spent his final weeks in office tirelessly negotiating with Iran, via third parties, for the release of the hostages. Carter achieved this objective, though Tehran delayed freeing the Americans until minutes after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981.

Carter had a long and extraordinarily active post-presidency, devoted to advancing numerous humanitarian and reform causes at home and abroad. Through the Carter Center, based in Atlanta, he and his wife Rosalynn Carter, who passed away in November 2023 at the age of 96, advocated worldwide to ameliorate conflict, build democratic institutions, promote human rights, and eradicate disease. Occasionally, and with varying degrees of support from his Oval Office successors, Carter personally intervened to resolve international crises. All of these efforts won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. The conciliatory and reformist impulses that had shaped Carter’s foreign policy, only to give way to more traditional approaches, became the driving mission of his post-White House years.