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Early in his presidency, Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in May 1977, outlining a new approach to America’s role in the world: human rights should be a “fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.” This was a sharp break from the foreign policy practiced by Carter’s predecessor, President Richard Nixon.
Carter wanted to end such American support for dictators and to emphasize US support for human rights, while also trying to bring peace to the Middle East. His record largely reflects this effort – but the Iran hostage crisis has tended to obscure that Carter was otherwise a successful commander-in-chief on the foreign policy front.
Within weeks of taking office, Carter wrote a letter of support to Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident. While this angered the Soviet regime, it helped to sustain the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, knowing that they had the US president firmly in their corner.
Carter’s approach to American foreign policy based on rights and justice also informed his decision to return the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. More than half a century earlier, President Teddy Roosevelt had supported Panama’s secession from Colombia, which resulted in the Americans building and owning the canal. But by the time Carter assumed office, the Panama Canal had become a symbol of US colonialism; Carter was determined to fix what he saw as a historical wrong, even if this was not an especially popular move politically in the US.
Carter prevailed, getting the more-than-two-thirds vote in the US Senate necessary to ratify the Panama Canal treaties. In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has publicly mused about getting the Panama Canal back, but since the US Senate has ratified the Panama Canal treaties and the Panamanian government has said it has no interest in handing the canal back to the US, the possibility of this happening seems quite remote.
Another success for Carter was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which had fought three major wars against each other. Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s President, Anwar Sadat, were bitter enemies when Carter brought them together at the US presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland for 13 days of intensive peace talks in September 1978.
It was Nixon who first traveled to China to begin the normalization process between the communist regime and the United States, but it was Carter who formally recognized China and established diplomatic relations between the two countries, which set the foundations for the largest trade partnership in history. And despite his peacenik image, it was Carter who started arming the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets who invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
And yet what defined Carter’s record as commander-in-chief for most Americans was the Iran hostage crisis when Islamist revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran along with more than 50 Americans. What precipitated the embassy takeover was the US providing refuge to the Shah of Iran, who the Iranian revolutionaries hated.
Carter authorized a rescue operation in April 1980 to free the American hostages in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw, sometimes called Desert One, was doomed almost as soon as it started. Several of the rescue helicopters encountered a fierce sandstorm, and one of them collided with an American transport plane during a refueling in the Iranian desert, killing eight American servicemen.
Despite the Iran hostage crisis, Carter’s legacy as commander-in-chief cannot be judged solely by the US hostages held in Iran and the failed rescue effort. Carter brokered a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel, opened US diplomatic relations with China, ended the colonial irritant of US control of the Panama Canal, and foregrounded human rights in American policy by, for instance, supporting Soviet dissidents while also taking a hardline when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
All in all, that’s a successful record for any commander-in-chief.
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