Happy Birthday to America’s Most Underrated President

Today, Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, will celebrate his 100th birthday. He is the only U.S. president to reach that milestone, and his centenary is an appropriate moment to reflect upon his presidency and his handling of foreign policy. The more one studies it, the better it looks, especially when compared with most of his successors.

Like most one-term presidents, Carter left office in 1980 with a decidedly mixed reputation. Much of the criticism centered on his handling of the U.S. economy: He had the misfortune to become president in an era of stagflation, with slow growth and soaring consumer prices. This situation allowed Republican candidate Ronald Reagan to pose his famous question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

But Carter also won few plaudits for his handling of foreign policy: The combination of the Iranian Revolution, subsequent hostage crisis and failed rescue mission, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led many to regard him as a weak leader who had allowed the United States’ adversaries to run amok. Toss in the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua in 1979 and this portrait of weakness seems complete.

It’s also inaccurate and unfair. With regard to Iran, revolutions are inherently unpredictable and chaotic events, and outside powers rarely handle them well. Contrary to popular mythology, the Shah of Iran did not fall because Carter abandoned him or criticized his human rights violations; he lost power because he had lost touch with the Iranian people and was suffering from an undisclosed (and ultimately fatal) cancer. The United States was bound to have problems with Iran’s new rulers, but the hostage crisis occurred after Carter succumbed to pressure from Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and others to admit the dying Shah into the United States for medical treatment. It was a mistake, but a lot of distinguished foreign-policy experts helped him make it. Nor should we forget that Carter’s patient diplomacy ultimately got every hostage home safely, a lesson that some current world leaders would be wise to heed.

More importantly, the charge that Carter was some sort of soft-hearted and naive liberal is nonsense. As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and a former naval officer (making him and George H. W. Bush the only U.S. presidents to have served in the military since 1975), Carter understood the importance of a strong defense wedded to a principled foreign policy.

As former Carter aide Stuart E. Eizenstadt noted last year in Foreign Affairs, “most of the major weapons systems deployed by the Reagan administration had actually been approved by Carter: the stealth bomber, the MX mobile missile, and modern cruise missiles among them.” He also created the Rapid Deployment Force to deter Soviet intervention and protect access to Persian Gulf oil, and authorized covert aid to the Afghan resistance and the Nicaraguan opposition to the Sandanistas. Bottom line: Carter was no dove.

Carter’s positive accomplishments are more impressive today than they appeared at the time. Hard-liners criticized his emphasis on human rights as naive and unrealistic (I recall thinking the same when I was in graduate school), but he was on to something important. Emphasizing human rights enhanced the United States’ “soft power” at a time when its reputation needed burnishing. As Friedbert Pfluger, a former West German official, later wrote: Under Carter, “[t]he United States was no longer identified with Vietnam, Watergate, and CIA, but once again with freedom in the Western hemisphere.”

Carter’s open and vocal support for the Czech Charter 77 movement, the Helsinki Accords, and for Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov also reinforced pressure for change within the Warsaw Pact, which ultimately bore fruit a decade later. As Eizenstadt noted, former Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin later said that Carter’s policies “played a significant role in the long and difficult process of liberalization inside the Soviet Union.”

Carter also deserves credit for negotiating the SALT II Treaty, which placed further limits on Soviet and U.S. strategic weapons. Although it was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, both superpowers adhered to its limits voluntarily for years afterward. Carter also pressed Brazil and Argentina to forego their nascent nuclear programs, as each ultimate chose to do a few years later, thereby strengthening the nonproliferation regime.

His major foreign-policy achievement, of course, was his stewardship of the peace process between Egypt and Israel. His intense and personal involvement in the negotiations produced the breakthrough Camp David Accords in 1978, leading to the landmark Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty the following year. As U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller later recalled: “No matter whom I spoke to—Americans, Egyptians, or Israelis—most everyone said the same thing: no Carter, no peace treaty.”

Although Carter is often criticized for being insufficiently “pro-Israel,” former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami saw his contribution more clearly. It was Carter, he wrote, who “managed eventually to produce meaningful breakthroughs on the way to an Arab-Israeli peace.” Why? Because he was “ready to confront Israel head on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America.”

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By removing Egypt from the anti-Israel camp, Carter did more for Israeli security than any president before or since. In his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter warned that Israel faced a stark choice: either grant Palestinians a state of their own or end up as an apartheid regime. It was a prophetic message, and today we are witnessing the bleak and tragic results of Israel’s failure to heed Carter’s warning.

Moreover, consider how his successors have fared. Reagan presided over the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which led to the creation of Hezbollah, and he did more or less nothing to encourage regional peace. George H.W. Bush fared better, leading the coalition that liberated Kuwait in the first Gulf War and then convening the 1991 Madrid peace conference, but he was unable to capitalize on these developments. Bill Clinton helped to finalize the 1993 Oslo Accords, but his subsequent efforts to broker a lasting peace settlement achieved bupkis, and his misguided policy of dual containment in the Persian Gulf was a major inspiration for al Qaeda and helped lay the groundwork for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003 spread chaos throughout the region and increased Iranian influence there and elsewhere, and his half-hearted efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace went nowhere. Barack Obama understood that a two-state solution was in “Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest,” but his refusal to take on the Israel lobby doomed his efforts from the start. Donald Trump and amateur diplomat Jared Kushner dismissed the Palestinians and gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carte blanche, unwittingly giving Hamas an additional reason to plan a dramatic attack, as it ultimately did on Oct. 7, 2023.

The pattern is hard to miss: Carter left the Middle East better off at the end of his presidency; all but one of his successors made things worse. And President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have now set the bar even lower: supporting a genocide, helping Israel isolate itself further, shredding the so-called rules-based order that they claim to defend, and damaging the United States’ image around the world.

It is hard to imagine Carter (or the elder Bush) acting as Biden and Blinken have done. They would have recognized that unconditional support was not in Washington’s interest—or in Israel’s long-term interest, either. They would also have had the backbone to stand up to pressure from the lobby, a quality that these other presidents typically lacked.

Finally, a word must be said about Carter’s conduct since leaving office. He is often described as “America’s best ex-president,” and the label is well-deserved. In retirement, Obama has worked on his golf game; the younger Bush has devoted himself to painting; Clinton has hobnobbed with global VIPs and tried to advance his wife’s political ambitions; and Trump has divided his time between court appearances, shameless grifting, and trying to undermine the nation’s democratic order.

By comparison, Jimmy Carter has spent the past 44 years monitoring elections around the world, writing books on a variety of topics, helping efforts to eradicate water-borne diseases, mediating in conflicts, getting hostages released, and a host of other good works. Although a few have come close, no president in my lifetime has made “public service” a lifetime commitment and not just a sound bite in a commencement speech.

So happy birthday, Mr. President! I didn’t vote for you in 1976, but I did in 1980, and I wish that I could vote for someone like you today. We could do a lot worse.