Jimmy Carter never needed redemption

The former president, who has died at age 100, knew that America should not confuse restraint with weakness.

The jury had long come to its clear majority verdict on former US president Jimmy Carter by the time he died at age 100 on 29 December at his home in Plains, Georgia. A thin-voiced, nerdy, preachy peanut farmer from the deep south, surrounded by cronies, palpably out of his depth in Washington — a one-term Democrat president whose promise to lift America out of its post-Watergate, post-Vietnam despond turned to dust.

His presidency began in January 1977, when the memory of a defeated America deploying helicopters to evacuate its embassy in Saigon was still fresh. His administration was later utterly demoralised in April 1980 by a breakdown of different American helicopters in an Iranian desert – on a mission to rescue the US diplomats held hostage in the embassy in Tehran.

There’s more. The economy tanked – and he was, the verdict continues, a Cold War president who got nowhere with the Soviet Union.

Yes, he had one big, if imperfect, achievement while in office: the brokering of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, which played to a great Carter strength – his mastery of detail. But overall, we are led to believe he was just too small for the job.

And then the redemptive long coda as head of the Carter Center human rights organisation. He travelled to the world’s hotspots – from Eritrea to Korea to Bosnia — to douse the flames, acting as the trusted observer for scores of elections and leading public health initiatives, including one successful programme that greatly reduced mortality from Guinea worm disease. All of this brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Yet, contrary to public opinion, Carter in the White House was not a flop. He had graduated from the US Naval Academy with distinction, served seven years as a naval officer and was confident enough to be very wary about using America’s military power to impose its will abroad – in sharp contrast to his predecessors both Democrat and Republican.

True, his administration, like many, was chronically divided about strategy. His national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, often linked regional conflicts to the grand struggle with the Soviet Union, while his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, took a markedly different view of the world, understanding, for instance, that the civil war in Angola was not best seen as “made in the Kremlin”. Carter never created a coherent worldview, but that was a great deal less damaging to American interests than bad world views — the domino theory that led to Vietnam, or the interventionism of George W. Bush in Iraq in 2003 – and the bloody chaos that followed. Carter spoke out against that latter war when that was far from the prevailing wisdom. He thought it was unnecessary and – a Carter word – unjust.

In Latin America, the prevailing American orthodoxy pre-Carter was to prop up grizzly authoritarian regimes – to stop another Cuba. Among a host of examples: America had supported a coup and installed a dictator in Bolivia in 1971 and, more famously, played a crucial role in toppling Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.

Carter set out to reverse Harry Kissinger’s “realist” view that human rights were not a concern when it came to anti-Soviet dictators perpetrating major abuses. Of course, he couldn’t simply overthrow regimes he detested, like the military junta in Argentina. Sending troops to Buenos Aires was not an option and he knew that American-backed coups would not produce sustainable answers. But Carter was right to plant a human rights flag and to reverse the presumption of impunity for those involved in murder and torture.

He found other ways of defending American interests that did not rely on raw power. The Panama Canal had been controlled by America since 1903 and there had been any number of Panamanian demonstrations and revolts. Carter negotiated a treaty that gave America a permanent right to defend the canal from any threat but was nevertheless confronted by hellfire rhetoric, largely from Republicans, who yearned for untrammelled American power. Ceding the canal to Panama would be, as Philip Crane, a Republican congressman from Illinois, put it, “one more nail in the coffin of American sea power…one more crucial American step in a descent to ignominy”. Yet Carter got the treaty through the Senate in the end with the help of 14 Republicans – a dollop of bipartisanship unimaginable now.

He had to deal with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union – not Gorbachev’s. The Soviet Union was still a rigid gerontocracy. But he painstakingly negotiated a nuclear weapons deal in 1979, which had no chance of being ratified once the Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul. Ronald Reagan denounced the treaty as it was being formulated, but when he became president in 1981 he abided by its terms. As did Moscow.

Even before the Tehran hostage fiasco beginning in November 1979, the rise of the Ayatollahs presented a huge challenge. Iranian oil supply was severely disrupted and there were queues for petrol in America, a hitherto unimaginable phenomenon. The world economy shuddered. Carter went on television in July 1979 for what became known as his “crisis of confidence” broadcast with the aim of lessening American dependence on foreign oil. He made some less than cheery observations about aspects of the American way of life. There was a problem with “self-indulgence and consumption” and proclaimed that “every act of energy conservation… is more than just common sense, I tell you it is an act of patriotism”. He did more than talk. He brought in regulations that encouraged American manufacturers to stop building gas-guzzling cars and probably helped save the American auto industry in the process. He put solar panels on the White House (removed by Reagan a decade later).

In the immediate aftermath of that striking broadcast Carter’s poll numbers went up but, in the end, he became irrevocably associated with that most un-American of attributes: pessimism. He lost by miles in the 1980 election to “it’s morning again in America” Reagan.

In his diaries, published in 2010, Carter writes of a White House dinner close to the time of his departure. The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich told him La Traviata, Tosca and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had all been booed on their first nights and that history “would treat him in the same way as they did Verdi, Puccini and Beethoven”. It hasn’t quite worked out that way; there’s no clamour to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. But Carter understood well that America could not go on acting as if all constraints on its power were unreasonable and should be swatted aside – rather that America was a great power that should not confuse restraint with weakness. For all of that, he should be recognised and praised.

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