“President Carter is coming to Nicaragua, and he’s wondering if you could spare some time for him.” That was my most memorable telephone proposition. It led to an hour-long conversation in a hotel room where the manager had thoughtfully placed several bowls of Nicaraguan peanuts.
This was 1986, so Carter had been out of the White House for several years. Yet here he was, shuttling among Central American capitals trying to broker an end to regional wars — and asking a lowly newspaper reporter for insights. It reflected his lifelong passion for the world around him.
During his presidency, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, faced shattering foreign policy challenges. His record was decidedly mixed.
Carter opened a US “interest section” in Havana and improved US-Cuban relations. He signed a treaty giving Panama sovereignty over its canal, averting a possible nationalist uprising there. Perhaps most important, he was the first president to make human rights a factor in shaping foreign policy.
Yet Carter also had epochal failures. He greatly misjudged the explosive events that led to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. After a lavish dinner in Tehran in 1977, he praised the Shah for making Iran “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” Less than two years later, after the Shah had been deposed, Carter allowed him into the United States despite being warned by US diplomats in Tehran that this could provoke an invasion of their embassy. The invasion came. After the invaders had held US diplomats hostage for six months, Carter ordered a rescue mission. It failed dramatically.
Carter also led the United States into what became decades of war in Afghanistan. On July 3, 1979, pressed by his militantly anti-Russian national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter began sending covert aid to Islamic militants so they could fight the pro-Moscow regime there. “That very day,” Brzezinski later recalled, “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” It did.
For a time, Carter’s role in brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel seemed to be his greatest foreign policy achievement. But the accords never produced the peace he envisioned, as he himself recognized: “Many of the promises have been broken, and there have been constant cycles of bloodshed and a rising tide of mistrust and hatred.”
If Carter’s foreign policy record during four years in office was marked by misjudgment and frustration, his work over the following four decades earns him the title of America’s greatest former president. The visit to Nicaragua during which I met him was just one of his ceaseless peace initiatives.
Some were political, like his trip to North Korea in 1994. A nuclear crisis was escalating and a second Korean War seemed possible. President Bill Clinton was frozen into inaction. Carter decided to go to Pyongyang, and after days of complex negotiating, he secured a compromise that defused tensions. “It quickly became clear,” a reporter who covered the trip wrote afterward, “that the former president’s intervention had halted a dangerous slide toward confrontation.”
Many of Carter’s global initiatives were humanitarian. None was more impressively successful than his campaign against the Guinea worm disease, which had long ravaged Africa. When he launched it in 1986, millions suffered from Guinea worm. Now there are only a couple of dozen known cases.
These and his many other projects earned Carter the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. Yet he refused to become a bland elder statesman and did not shy away from controversy.
Carter was harshly criticized for his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which was among the first to compare Israeli policies to those of apartheid-era South Africa. He also became a sharp critic of US military interventions abroad.
In 2019 Carter described the United States as “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Then he added: “China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. … Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None, and we have stayed at war.”
While in the White House, partly because of bad luck and circumstance, Carter was unable to reshape the world as he hoped. Afterward he became what he said he wanted America to be: “good and honest and decent and truthful and competent and compassionate and filled with love.”
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
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Publish date : 2024-12-29 08:31:00
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