CNN
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Early in his presidency, in May 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame that outlined a new approach to America’s role in the world: Carter declared that the rights of man should be a “fundamental principle of our foreign policy”. .”
This was a radical departure from the foreign policy practiced by Carter’s predecessor, President Richard Nixon, who, during the Vietnam War, intensified US secret bombingss of Vietnam’s neighbors, Cambodia and Laos, causing untold misery in those countries. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, succeeded in overthrowing the democratically elected party. socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Three years later, Kissinger also secretly gave the green light to military junta in Argentina to achieve what we call “Dirty War» to kill between 10,000 and 30,000 of his political opponents.
Carter wanted to end this American support for dictators and emphasize American support for human rights, while also trying to bring peace to the Middle East. His record largely reflects that effort – but the Iran hostage crisis has tended to obscure the fact that Carter was otherwise an effective commander in chief on the foreign policy front.
A few weeks after taking office, Carter wrote a letter of support to Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident. Although this angered the Soviet regime, it helped support the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, knowing that it had the American president firmly in its camp.
Carter’s approach to American foreign policy, based on rights and justice, also influenced 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, leading the Americans to build and own the canal through Panama, allowing ships to avoid traveling several thousand additional kilometers around Cape Horn. deep in South America.
But by the time Carter took office, the Panama Canal had become a symbol of American colonialism; Carter was determined to right what he saw as a historic wrong, even though it was not a particularly popular decision politically in the United States. Polls showed that half of Americans did not want to abandon the canal, and a promising Republican politician named Ronald Reagan said of the plan: “I am going to speak as long and as loudly as possible against this project. »
But ultimately, Carter gained the upper hand, getting the vote of more than two thirds in the U.S. Senate is needed to ratify the Panama Canal treaties.
In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has publicly mused about reclaiming the Panama Canal, but since the U.S. Senate ratified the Panama Canal treaties and the Panamanian government has said it has no interest in returning the canal to the United States, the Panamanian government stated that it had no interest in returning the canal to the United States. the possibility of this happening seems quite low.
Peace between Israel and Egypt
Another Carter success was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, who fought three major wars against each other. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were bitter enemies when Carter brought them together at the US presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland to 13 days of intensive peace talks in September 1978.
At Camp David, Carter cajoled Israeli and Egyptian leaders to continue negotiating even when talks were failing, and he leveraged his own encyclopedic knowledge of the issues at hand. the Middle East.
James Fallows was Carter’s primary speechwriter and remained at Camp David during the negotiations. Fallows says the peace deal simply would not have happened without Carter, who brought considerable attention to the details of the talks. Carter sat down with Begin and Sadat to look at maps of the Sinai region, which lies between Egypt and Israel, and Carter was “drawing lines and saying, ‘So what?’ And does the road lead here? And what about the water supply? So he was able to outplay anyone,” Fallows told me in an interview for the “In the Room” audio podcast.
The resulting peace agreement endures today, almost half a century later.
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 laid the foundation for the largest business partnership in history.
And despite his image as a pacifist, 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 power. American Embassy in Tehran with more than 50 Americans.
What precipitated the embassy takeover was that the United States provided sanctuary to the Shah of Iran, whom Iranian revolutionaries hated. Ironically, Carter had initially fiercely opposed the Shah’s entry into the United States, but he was persuaded by Kissinger and other Shah supporters that the Iranian monarch was about to die of cancer and had an urgent need for medical treatment that only the United States could provide it. (Shah’s medical prognosis was actually better than that presented at the time).
Carter authorized a rescue operation in April 1980 to free American hostages in Tehran. Operation Eagle Claw, sometimes called Desert One, was doomed almost as soon as it began. Several rescue helicopters encountered a severe sandstorm and one collided with a US transport plane while refueling in the Iranian desert, killing eight US service members.
A Pentagon investigation reveals numerous problems with Operation Eagle Claw: The Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines all wanted to play a role in this important operation, even though they had never worked together before on this type of mission . An overemphasis on operational security prevented services from sharing critical information, and there was no large-scale iteration of the plan.
Something had to be fixed. That solution was the creation in 1980 of the Joint Special Operations Command, which 31 years later would oversee the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. However, the long hostage crisis that lasted 444 days and the failure of the Iran rescue operation helped ensure that Carter would be a one-term president.
At a press conference in 2015, Carter was asked what he wished he had done differently while he was president. Carter responded, “I wish I had sent an extra helicopter to pick up the hostages, and we would have saved them, and I would have been re-elected.” »
This seems like wishful thinking. The challenge of rescuing 52 American hostages held by fanatical revolutionaries inside the American embassy in downtown Tehran, a city of millions, and then getting them out of the country would have been great.
That said, Carter’s legacy as commander in chief cannot be judged solely by the American hostages held in Iran and the failure of rescue efforts.
Carter negotiated a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel, opened diplomatic relations between the United States and China, ended the colonial irritant of American control of the Panama Canal, and established the rights of the he man at the forefront of American politics, for example supporting Soviet dissidents while taking a hard line when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Overall, it’s a successful record for any commander in chief.