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President Jimmy Carter has passed at the age of one hundred. The nearly fifty years since the end of his presidency have given us perspective on both Carter the man and Carter the leader. In particular, we now better understand his mixed, deeply controversial foreign policy legacy. 

Jimmy Carter: Just Misunderstood? 

Most of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy initiatives were formed under the shadow of the Cold War. Carter had hoped to build on the progress made in the Nixon and Ford administrations towards detente with the USSR. However, Carter’s views of the Soviet Union evolved and came to take a central place in his foreign policy.

In particular, his focus on human rights led to an increasingly dark view of Moscow. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States began to support rebels against the Soviet-installed Afghan government covertly. This would eventually involve a complex set of mechanics that included Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India, and a host of sketchy financiers and smugglers. In response to the invasion, Carter announced a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. This decision remains controversial, as it undercut one of the most obvious “soft diplomacy” tools available to Washington and paved a grim path for US-USSR relations as Carter left office. 

However, Carter wasn’t simply a hawk; he also put into motion SALT II, a set of talks intended to limit further strategic arms racing between the US and the USSR. Unfortunately, this effort was derailed by Republicans and hawkish Democrats and did not bear fruit until the Reagan administration. 

The Human Rights President on the World Stage 

Carter tried to make human rights a central tenet of his administration’s foreign policy but found that this created problems on fronts both foreign and domestic.

Many US clients were brutal human rights abusers, and human rights concerns threatened to derail negotiations even with neutral powers and Soviet allies. Despite his commitments, Carter made little effort to limit the depredations of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, instead continuing military and economic support of a brutal anti-communist regime. Carter’s intervention in South Korean politics was clumsy and ineffective, with threats of withdrawal helping lead to the assassination of one president and his replacement by an equally brutal dictator. Similar considerations characterized relations with China and with the military dictatorships of Latin America, although Carter did curtail or end support for the latter. 

However, the Carter administration had foreign policy achievements to stand on. Carter’s decision to return the Panama Canal to Panamanian authority, harshly criticized by conservatives in the United States to this day, was almost certainly the correct call. It helped generate goodwill towards the United States in Latin America and across the developing world at virtually zero military or economic cost. 

The Challenges and Successes 

In hindsight, Carter’s decision to distance the US from the Southern Cone military dictatorships has been justified, as all three would collapse in the decade following his Presidency. 

Carter’s most enduring foreign policy legacy is the Camp David Accords, an agreement between Israel and Egypt that resulted in the recognition of the former by the latter and in a rearrangement of the military and territorial status quo. The essential elements of the accords have remained in place for more than forty years and are the cornerstone of Egyptian and Israeli foreign policy. The Camp David Accords did not bring about Middle East peace, in large part because they did not address the Palestinian issue. Still, they changed the nature of the conflict and made cooperation between Israel and Arab states possible across a range of issues. 

But live by Middle East politics, die by Middle East politics. Carter’s handling of the Iranian Revolution signaled the death knell of his administration.

Carter was hardly alone in failing to read the signs of the Shah’s impending fall. Still, he responded with a confused policy that encouraged anti-American action without bringing about any positive results. Allowing Mohammad Reza Shah to enter the US for medical treatment was a humanitarian decision, but it exacerbated the situation in Tehran and helped poison US-Iranian relations for the last four decades. The hostage crisis that resulted effectively destroyed Carter’s hopes for re-election, with an ill-fated rescue operation resulting in the deaths of eight American combatants. 

As is appropriate for the man with the longest post-presidency in American history, Jimmy Carter continued to contribute to American foreign relations. He continued his humanitarian work, striving tirelessly for human rights worldwide. He acted as a special envoy to Nicaragua and North Korea and founded the Carter Center, which continues to work on international development issues. Carter was also one of the most senior American former officials who had undertaken advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people. 

President Jimmy Carter was, to borrow a phrase, a complicated man. It is necessary and inevitable that every President of the United States will cause immense joy and suffering; everything the United States does affects the rest of the world. In his four-year term, Carter made lasting achievements that continue to remain intact in our world today. But foreign policy also killed his administration, or at least made its survival devilishly tricky.

In the end, Carter’s foreign policy was much better than his conservative critics might allow, even if it failed to achieve all the ends he had hoped for. 

About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley 

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.