By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Carter began his presidency with an approval rating between 66% and 75%. He maintained approval ratings above 50% until March 1978, and the following month his approval rating fell to 39%, primarily due to the declining economy. His ratings briefly rebounded after the Camp David Accords in late 1978 but dipped during the 1979 energy crisis and got as low as 28% in July 1979. At the beginning of the Iran hostage crisis, his approval rating surged to 61%, up 23 points from his pre-crisis rating. Polls also found that up to 77% of Americans approved of Carter's initial response to the crisis, but by June 1980, amid heated criticism from across the political spectrum for his failure to free the hostages, his approval rating slumped to 33%; that same month Reagan surpassed Carter in pre-1980 election polling.

 

Operation Eagle Claw

Carter’s single term in office is rarely associated with foreign policy; economic malaise is front of mind for most. And to the extent that people do think of Carter’s foreign policy, they recall its failures—none more so than the Iranian hostage crisis. The former president’s death on December 29 at age 100, after a lifetime of service that stretched from his immediate community in Georgia to the far corners of the earth, is a moment for appreciation and reevaluation.

Carter’s work did not stop there. The process of moving from a framework to a formal treaty proved difficult. There were fundamental disagreements between Carter and Begin about what had been agreed, especially involving Israeli settlements in the West Bank. What was supposed to take days ended up taking months. In March 1979, to break the deadlock, Carter, with no assurance of success, shuttled between Jerusalem and Cairo for multiple days of intense personal negotiations. Finally, on March 26, six months after Camp David, Begin and Sadat, their hands joined by Carter’s, stood on the North Lawn of the White House to sign the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

The treaty remains in place today, the most significant achievement to emerge from decades of attempts at Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Relations between Israel and Egypt remain strong and stable. They may be tested by the ongoing war in Gaza and the economic pressure on Egypt resulting from the war—yet even the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the rise of a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood did not break them. As part of the treaty negotiations, the United States provided both Israel and Egypt with economic and military assistance—commitments that have endured. In fact, the two countries have remained among the top annual recipients of U.S. military aid ever since.

Unfortunately, and to Carter’s great dismay, the peace treaty and subsequent negotiations were unable to settle the issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians that are at the core of tensions in the region to this day. Carter set in motion a process to create an amenable solution; indeed, both the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 drew on the Camp David Accords for their approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But with the Palestinians refusing to participate at Camp David, a solution under Carter was always unlikely. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the humanitarian tragedy that followed were a stark reminder of that.

 

Remaking a Region

Carter strategically reoriented U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. After the Iranian Revolution caused the price of oil to soar, enriching the Soviets and encouraging their adventure in Afghanistan, Carter confronted rising energy costs and expanding Soviet influence. He prioritized ensuring the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. A hostile power in control of the Middle East could cripple the economies of the United States and its allies. And so, in his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter announced a new redline to bipartisan applause: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To back up this commitment, Carter established a rapid deployment force, which would eventually become U.S. Central Command, the military’s primary presence in the Middle East and Central Asia today.

What became known as the Carter Doctrine has undergirded the United States’ approach to the Persian Gulf for decades, protecting U.S. interests while allowing regional powers to develop their security capabilities. 

The most searing image of Carter’s record in the Middle East is the wreckage of downed aircraft in the desert, the result of a failed 1980 operation, known as Operation Eagle Claw, to free the 53 U.S. hostages held in Tehran. It is painful to review the Carter administration’s encounter with Iran—including poor intelligence from the outset of the revolution, diplomatic miscues, and flaws in the operation that ultimately cost the lives of eight service members. The failed mission damaged U.S. standing, and politically, it doomed the Carter presidency.

Carter and Begin made kiddush at a Shabbat dinner with their families at Blair House, the presidential guest house, in Washington, D.C., on March 2, 1979.

But the Carter administration learned from this experience: a Pentagon review of the failed rescue attempt laid bare the need for a dedicated special operations component that could integrate the capabilities of different branches of the military. To that end, in December 1980, Carter established the Joint Special Operations Command. JSOC was designed to incorporate intelligence, training, and tactics from across the U.S. military to create a “best of the best” command that could covertly carry out complicated missions in dangerous places.

Thirty years after JSOC’s founding, it was one of its components, known as SEAL Team Six, that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The parallels between the Iranian operation and the Pakistani one could not have been missed: once again, the U.S. military was hoping to sneak U.S. troops on low-flying helicopters into a country to conduct a high-risk, high-reward raid. History was in the Situation Room as President Barack Obama considered whether to authorize the raid. He was joined by some officials who had played a role in the 1980 operation, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gates had served as an aide to Carter’s CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, and was in the White House the night of Operation Eagle Claw.

What made the decision facing Obama particularly hard was that there was no direct evidence that bin Laden was in Abbottabad; the information presented to the president was analytical and circumstantial. Indeed, Obama’s advisers were split about whether to proceed. Obama ultimately decided to go forward. I believe the decisive factor was his faith in JSOC—a unique American asset available to the president in 2011, not in 1980.

 

Managing China

Carter would say later that the most significant decision of his presidency was the establishment of diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Seven years earlier, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had set the United States down the path toward normalization, yet relations remained limited. Progress toward full normalization had stalled because of disagreements over Taiwan, Republican opposition, and the distraction and tragedy of Vietnam. Nixon’s resignation and Mao Zedong’s death sucked the remaining life out of the process. When Carter assumed office, relations were stagnant. The last time the two countries’ leaders met was in December 1975, when President Gerald Ford visited Mao in Beijing.

Carter was determined to finish what Nixon had started. On December 15, 1978, he announced a deal to normalize relations with the People’s Republic of China. Carter had personally managed the final negotiations by sending detailed instructions to U.S. envoys. To reach the agreement, he struck a crucial balance. He advanced the “one China” policy as the basis of normalizing U.S.-Chinese relations. Carter then signed the Taiwan Relations Act, which strengthened unofficial ties between the United States and Taiwan and committed the United States to provide Taiwan with the means necessary to defend itself. The combination of these policy steps remains the bedrock of U.S. policy today. It created an enduring political consensus for managing the complexity of ties with both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.

Carter achieved the agreement in a specific geopolitical context: the intensification of the Cold War. The purpose of U.S. engagement with China, as with most U.S. foreign policy at the time, was not limited to Asia; instead, it was part of an effort to balance against an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union. U.S.-Chinese normalization struck a blow against the Soviets. The two leading communist countries were now more divided than ever—a development encouraged by the United States. China even agreed to host joint intelligence stations to monitor Soviet nuclear and missile test facilities.

At a time when China threatens to change the status quo, including by force, it is worth noting that the framework that Carter put in place has delivered peace across the Taiwan Strait for more than 40 years. It has also allowed Taiwan to become a vibrant democracy and home to one of the most dynamic high-tech economies in the world.

 

Confronting Moscow

Perhaps Carter’s most underappreciated foreign policy initiative was his role in ensuring the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union. Near the end of his term, Carter pursued a much more confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union. Although his successor, Ronald Reagan, is credited for bringing about the end of the Cold War, it was Carter who laid the groundwork for the subsequent decade of tough anti-Soviet policies. As Gates, who served as acting CIA director under Reagan, noted in his memoir, Carter “took the first steps to strip away the mask of Soviet ascendancy and exploit the reality of Soviet vulnerability.”

Carter challenged, publicly and consistently, the legitimacy of Soviet rule. He assailed Moscow’s human rights abuses and amplified the testimony of countless dissidents who challenged its moral authority. He imposed new sanctions in response to the Soviet Union’s affronts to human rights, especially following the trials of the well-known dissidents Natan Sharansky and Alexander Ginzburg. Declassified CIA reports reveal that Carter’s involvement on behalf of Soviet dissidents particularly disturbed Soviet authorities.

Beyond his rhetoric, Carter pioneered new economic and military capabilities to counter the Soviet Union. He initiated a vast modernization of U.S. forces to meet the Soviet threat. He reversed the post-Vietnam decline in U.S. defense spending, providing the basis for the defense buildup that is usually associated with Reagan. The budget request for fiscal year 1982 that Carter issued in the final days of his presidency was, at the time, the country’s largest defense budget, adjusted for inflation, since the tail end of the Vietnam War. Even Reagan’s annual increases did not always meet Carter’s lofty goal.

Carter also transformed U.S. national security strategy by modernizing force levels, mobilization, and communications; upgrading NATO forces and equipment to counter the Warsaw Pact; revamping the U.S. nuclear arsenal’s command-and-control system; and accelerating the development of stealth aircraft technology. “Carter began much of what the Reagan administration carried out,” the Pentagon historian Edward Keefer has written, adding, “The Reagan revolution in defense began under Carter.” Even Reagan, who criticized Carter’s military spending throughout the 1980 presidential campaign, eventually praised his attention to military preparedness. Around the world, too, Carter undertook dogged efforts to confront and resist Moscow, most notably in Afghanistan, where nearly a decade of quagmire contributed to the Soviet Union’s downfall.

 

A Lasting Legacy

In four years in office, Carter managed to shape four decades of American foreign policy. His legacy can be seen in the approaches that his successors took toward the Middle East, Beijing, and Moscow, but it does not end there. He forged ties in the Western Hemisphere. He elevated human rights in U.S. foreign policy. He spurred the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a powerful and lasting reminder of the horrors of genocide. He bolstered U.S. energy security, creating the Department of Energy and accelerating the development of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Carter met the challenges of his time, some of his own making, with strength and foresight. In his century of life, he left a lasting legacy. It ought to include his contributions to U.S. national security.

 

 

For updates click hompage here