Jimmy Carter remembered

Experts from across Chatham House look at the key challenges and achievements of the 39th president of the United States.

Expert comment Published 30 December 2024 6 minute READ

A legacy beyond the White House

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, Director, US and Americas Programme

Jimmy Carter will be remembered for many things, but his post-presidency work to advance peace, democracy, human rights, and freedom from poverty and hunger is an extraordinary example for all leaders.  

For many Americans, his term in office will be remembered for long petrol queues at home as well as high unemployment and inflation. His foreign policy legacy as president was complex, but for many in the US it is defined by the Iran hostage crisis which consumed the final 444 days of his presidency and was televised every night across the country. 

President Carter’s handling of the crisis was widely criticized but his work to make human rights a priority as early as 1976 was visionary. It came at a time when the promotion of human rights was seen to be at odds with the more central priorities of a superpower during the Cold War.

Carter worked to deliver the Camp David Accords and a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. While complex in their impact, these contributions were a hallmark of his presidency and deeply informed his post-presidency work.

President Carter focused on integrating human rights into conflict mediation. 

For more than four decades after his time in the White House, Carter worked to mediate conflicts and to promote democracy and human rights. He was a non-interventionist and did not advocate using force to advance these values. Rather, he focused on integrating human rights into conflict mediation – a break with earlier approaches that had seen such principles as impeding efforts to end conflicts. 

These beliefs remained integral to his work and that of The Carter Center which he founded in 1982, shortly after he lost his attempt to win a second term. 

Jimmy Carter also worked to eradicate deadly disease and combat world hunger and poverty. It is this work for which he was most widely respected and which set a gold standard for post-presidency leadership.  

He served as an unofficial ambassador for international peace and mediation missions across the globe, including in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Bosnia. In 1994, he led a mission to Haiti to restore the democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

Under his leadership, The Carter Center became a global authority in election monitoring, working on 113 elections across 39 countries, including recently in Myanmar, Bolivia, Cote d’Ivoire, Tunisia and Nepal. Carter was also widely recognised for his work for the charity, Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes around the world. 

In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his ‘untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development’.  His work did not end upon receiving the award, and he continued his endeavours for more than a decade afterwards. 

 

The Middle East: from human rights to realism

Dr Sanam Vakil, Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme

Despite international applause for President Jimmy Carter’s engagement in the Middle East, within the region, Carter’s legacy is less celebrated.  As president he was faced with a barrage of regional crises, most taking place in 1979. 

His legacy in the Middle East is very much tied to what he did – and did not – accomplish in his four years in office.

This included the Iranian Revolution that triggered a global energy crisis and altered Iran’s domestic and regional path, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Camp David Accords.  

His presidency sought to elevate human rights as a US foreign policy principle but these efforts were derailed by the need for conflict management and regional security.  While deeply committed to these issues throughout his life, Carter’s legacy in the region is very much tied to what he did – and did not – accomplish in his four years in office.  

Carter was instrumental in brokering the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought together Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to sign the first Arab-Israeli peace agreement.  While this process was in the works for a number of years, Carter’s role at Camp David was key to formalizing an end to the conflict between two states that had engaged in four wars since Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence.  

The Accords did not result in a warm peace between the countries, and in fact led to Egypt’s regional isolation and President Sadat’s 1981 assassination. Yet they were celebrated globally as an important achievement that set Carter up for a broader international conflict mediation role.  

Carter’s work enabled successive US presidents to build on this peace model, to try to broker further peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours, including the Oslo Accords. Despite optimism around the 1993 agreements, which resulted in Palestinian recognition of Israel and Jordan’s 1994 peace deal, a durable, meaningful and stable peace between Israel and Palestine has yet to be achieved.  

The 2020 Abraham Accords normalizing ties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain is another ‘successor agreement’ of Carter’s work, aimed at Israel’s regional integration.

In 1978, while visiting Tehran, Carter shortsightedly referred to Iran as an ‘island of stability’ in the region.  The eruption of the Iranian Revolution one year later, the dramatic US hostage crisis that ensued and the breaking of US-Iranian relations came to define Carter’s presidency.   

Fearing that the US government would offer asylum to Iran’s exiled Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iranian student revolutionaries seized 52 American staff members at the US embassy in Tehran, holding them hostage for 444 days. 

For many in the Middle East, Carter’s presidency captured the perennial US challenge of trying to balance its interests with its values.

A failed rescue attempt resulted in the deaths of eight American servicemen and ushered in a wave of domestic criticism.  While the hostages were released just after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, tensions between Tehran and Washington continue and remain a foreign policy challenge for US presidents.  

Against the backdrop of the revolution and in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter’s regional engagement moved from prioritizing the protection of human rights to a realist defence of American interests in the Middle East – an approach which became known as the Carter Doctrine. 

It set a precedent for US defence of its Persian Gulf interests that endured for decades and ultimately increased US military interventions in the region.  For many in the Middle East, Carter’s presidency captured the perennial US challenge of trying to balance its interests with its values.

 

Soviet policy: laying the groundwork for much that came after

James Nixey, Director, Russia and Eurasia Programme

Jimmy Carter’s scoresheet on America’s Soviet policy will always be marked down by many simply because he wasn’t Ronald Reagan.

Carter saw the USSR as something to be contained. Reagan, subsequently, saw it as something to be dismantled, and since the USSR’s collapse can be seen to have begun on Reagan’s watch, in most minds, he got the credit (along with Mikhail Gorbachev). 

To the unkind, Carter was therefore ‘soft on Russia’. There is some truth to this, but it hides a deeper complexity. 

Carter saw the USSR as something to be contained. Reagan, subsequently, saw it as something to be dismantled.

Carter’s single term was a presidency of two halves as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. His conciliatory policies toward the USSR only lasted until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. 

In policies with a distinct echo into today, Carter recognised the global security threat the war posed and began arming the Afghans with clear intent to weaken the USSR. He also pulled the US out of the Moscow 1980 Olympics in protest at the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The objective was ultimately realised, but not during his tenure in the White House.

The Soviet-Afghan war, along with Soviet incursions into southern Africa and the Horn, persuaded Carter to push through the biggest peacetime increase in America’s defence budget since President Harry Truman. These events brought about the end of Carter’s détente-favouring secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and the increase in influence of national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

It should be remembered that Carter and his administration were dealing with an aging politburo and a near-comatose Soviet leader in Leonid Brezhnev. It was in stark contrast to the relatively accommodating opposite numbers his successors would face (at least until Vladimir Putin’s rule). This is especially true with regard to Mikhail Gorbachev, and his policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring).

Carter’s record on the USSR is a further example of what an unlucky president he was. 

There was, though, some progress: Carter and Brezhnev managed to push through a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing – something that (in a different form) lasted until 2023 when Russia withdrew its ratification. 

Carter’s record on the USSR is a further example of what an unlucky president he was.  He lay the groundwork for eventual outcomes for which others would take full credit. And yet his policies are a salutary lesson for today. They remind us that regimes are often more brittle than they appear – especially when given a push, from within or from the outside.

The USSR collapsed just over ten years after Carter left office – a seismic event few saw coming, including Carter himself. Nonetheless, his willingness to shift policy based upon the evidence of Soviet encroachment offers another lesson for modern policymakers, considering the fruits that change eventually bore.

 

Approach to Latin America: breaking with convention

Dr Christopher Sabatini, Senior Research Fellow for Latin America, US and the Americas Programme

President Jimmy Carter often cited the Panama Canal Treaty, which established a process for the US to hand over the canal it had built to Panama, as one of his proudest accomplishments in office.  

Carter saw the US control of the canal as a sore spot in US-Latin American relations at a time when guerrilla insurgencies, often inspired by social change and supported by the Soviet Union, were battling military juntas from Central America to Argentina.  

Opposition to the Treaty included claims that the canal would deteriorate under Panama’s control or worse, would fall under the influence of the Soviet Union. Yet the canal was handed over to Panama in 2000, after Carter’s time in office but as part of the Treaty. Despite recent unsubstantiated allegations by President-elect Donald Trump, the canal has remained independently and professionally managed, and Panama remains one of the US’s strongest allies in the region.

President Carter also opened diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1977. Anti-communists opposed the move, but it allowed for important communication for Cuban-Americans with the island, as well as providing material support for human rights and democracy activists there. 

The opening, which stopped short of full diplomatic normalization, broke a US-imposed diplomatic isolation that had lasted since 1961. For many in the Cuban-American community, the move was anathema, equivalent to legitimizing their nemesis, President Fidel Castro, and his revolution. This was despite the fact that the US had diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and (since President Richard Nixon) with China, both far greater threats to US security.

The notion that the political and civil rights of individuals before their governments could be in a country’s foreign policy, or even its national interest, was revolutionary.

The Carter administration’s decision to place human rights as a central component of foreign policy for the first time had a mixed reception in Latin America.  The notion that the political and civil rights of individuals before their governments could be in a country’s foreign policy, or even its national interest, was revolutionary.

Within Latin America that had a positive impact in that it signalled to human rights activists and citizens suffering under repressive military regimes that their pain and concerns were not being ignored. This was the case in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and much of Central America.

Carter’s approach also led to material change: his administration instigated a halt on US weapons sales to the Argentine military when it was determined they could be used to maintain the junta’s brutal regime, in which more than 10,000 citizens were killed or ‘disappeared’ from 1977 to 1983. 

Carter’s human rights foreign policy, though, did have its critics. Many blamed it for the victory of the Sandinista guerrilla forces in Nicaragua in 1979.  For Republicans and cold warriors, the Carter administration’s human rights foreign policy failed to distinguish between the different types of anti-democratic actors.

These critics included the next president Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick. She perceived the greater threat as coming from totalitarian, communist leaders rather than from ‘merely’ authoritarian forces, such as militaries. 

Kirkpatrick argued that the former were more complete in their smothering of civil society and freedoms, and more enduring.  In contrast, authoritarian, military governments, allowed limited space for independence and were often temporary.  They also tended, not coincidentally, to be more pro-American.