You wouldn’t know it from most obituaries, but former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was a visionary president on foreign policy.
His achievements are little remembered but consequential: pardoning Vietnam-era draft dodgers, winning ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, engineering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China, implementing a historic human rights policy, and responding to crises in Afghanistan and Poland in ways that helped the United States win the Cold War.
Even his signature failure—the aborted mission to rescue 52 U.S. Embassy staff members held hostage in Iran—was not the complete fiasco depicted at the time.
So why does Carter remain so disrespected as a foreign-policy president? There are two explanations.
First, Carter was an ardently noninterventionist commander in chief. He was the only president since Thomas Jefferson under whom no shots were fired in anger on the battlefield and under whom no soldiers were killed or wounded in combat. (Eight Americans died in the failed rescue attempt, but many more casualties would have been likely had Carter refused to allow the mission to end in humiliation in the desert.) This bias for peace—as well as Carter’s failure to master the stagecraft of the presidency—contributed to an impression of weakness.
The second factor was a concerted effort by conservatives—including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan—to smear him as soft.
Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, visit the Panama Canal in June 1978. As president, he won ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, which would turn over control of the canal to the Panamanians.Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Carter’s initial unheralded achievement took place on his first day in office. After campaigning in 1976 as a healer, he issued blanket pardons to those who had fled to Canada and elsewhere to avoid the draft. This was a gutsy move to bind up the festering wounds of the Vietnam War, which had ended less than two years earlier; even as a lame duck, outgoing President Gerald Ford had rejected advice that he do the same.
For issuing the pardons, Carter was attacked by conservatives, of course, but also by some liberals. Those to his left felt that he should have also pardoned deserters, who were more often from impoverished backgrounds. This set a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished standard that applied to the rest of his presidency.
Throughout his term, Carter felt a strong sense of duty and responsibility, and he acted on it even when the politics were terrible. He was told, for instance, that he should wait until his second term to complete any deal that would turn over control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. Reagan, a former California governor, had almost wrested the Republican presidential nomination from Ford in 1976 on the strength of his opposition to relinquishing the canal. Trying to ratify the treaties was a political loser and the heaviest of heavy foreign-policy lifts in the Senate.
Yet Carter brushed aside that advice to wait, believing—correctly—that he was doing the right thing. That took courage, as well as political skill.
After the canal negotiations were completed, polls showed that two-thirds of the U.S. public opposed the treaties—and ratification required the support of two-thirds of the Senate. Carter set to work building a fragile bipartisan coalition. With the help of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he convinced Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker that without the treaties, it would take 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Panama in perpetuity to protect the canal, which is vital to global commerce, from inevitable terrorist attacks.
He won ratification with no votes to spare, and a half-dozen Democrats later lost their seats at least in part for siding with him. When Reagan became president, he quietly dropped the issue and made no effort to back away from the treaties, which have held up well.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (right) shakes hands with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at Camp David in Maryland in 1978. Over nearly two weeks, Carter helped negotiate the Camp David Accords peace agreements between Israel and Egypt.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
As with the Panama Canal, Carter took big political risks for Middle East peace, including bringing the Israeli and Egyptian leaders to the United States for secret peace talks. Over the course of 13 days at Camp David in September 1978, both Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin grew angry and threatened to leave several times, which would have left the U.S. president looking impotent. Only Carter’s astonishing tenacity—his wheedling, cajoling, and improvising—saved the day. On Sept. 17, 1978, the two sides signed a pair of agreements establishing the framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement.
But almost immediately after the parties returned from Camp David, the deal fell apart. Six months later, over the objections of advisors who understandably worried that Carter was connecting himself too personally to a failed peace effort, he traveled to Egypt and Israel and painstakingly put the whole thing back together again. On March 26, 1979, the two countries signed a formal peace treaty.
The Camp David Accords turned out to be the most durable diplomatic achievement since the end of World War II. “What he has done with the Middle East is one of the most extraordinary things any president in history has ever accomplished,” said Averell Harriman, a veteran U.S. diplomat who sometimes gave Carter advice.
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Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, with their wives, pose near pyramids in Egypt in 1979. - Sadat and Carter, with their wives, pose near the pyramids in Egypt in March 1979. Corbis via Getty Images
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U.S. President Jimmy Carter visits Israel to salvage the Middle East peace accords in March 1979. Daniel Simon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images - Carter visits Jerusalem after a stay in Cairo to salvage the Middle East peace accords in March 1979. Daniel Simon/Getty Images
Carter was the first president to back a Palestinian state, which along with his rhetoric afterward—including a 2006 book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid—made him the most pro-Palestinian U.S. president ever, a fact that angered American Jews for decades. Based on the Camp David Accords alone, however, he also turned out to be the best U.S. president for Israel’s security since Harry Truman. That’s because the only army with the capacity to destroy Israel—the Egyptian army—has been neutralized for more than four decades.
Carter’s triumphs extended to Asia. Then-U.S. President Richard Nixon opened the door to China in 1972, but it was Carter who walked through it by normalizing relations. This was not inevitable. Nixon and Ford, under pressure from the right, adopted an unworkable “two-China policy” regarding Taiwan that prevented full diplomatic recognition of mainland China until Carter provided it in 1979.
After Carter hosted Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping at a historic 1979 summit in Washington, D.C., Deng returned to China and legalized private property. Along with other reforms, this allowed a nation with the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa to experience the broadest, fastest economic growth in modern times. Today, the U.S.-China bilateral relationship is, for better or worse, the foundation of the global economy.
And at Carter’s urging, Deng allowed millions of Chinese to become active Christians, making Carter one of history’s most successful missionaries.
Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping applauds as Carter speaks at the White House in Washington, D.C., in January 1979. As president, Carter normalized U.S. relations with China.Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
During his presidency, Carter did not speak out against repression in China. His famous human rights initiative was unevenly applied, and when it collided with Cold War priorities, it was often hypocritical. But it was nonetheless historic, marking the first time a major nation had ever made the treatment of people in other countries a central part of its foreign policy.
Carter first focused on human rights during the 1976 presidential campaign, when an aide, Richard Holbrooke (an early editor of this magazine), suggested it would be a good campaign issue against Ford, whose secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was under fire for ignoring human rights abuses in Chile and elsewhere. Carter had long admired the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and he soon resolved to take the U.S. civil rights movement global.
After he assumed office, Carter spoke out almost immediately on behalf of Soviet dissidents, and with the help of Patricia Derian, the first U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, he pressured Latin American regimes to move toward democracy.
Even now, with the number of authoritarian countries growing, there are many more democracies today than in the 1970s. That is due, at least in part, to Carter and his appointees (especially U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young) putting “human rights” into the international vocabulary.
This policy had an underappreciated impact on the Cold War. Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who later became president of the Czech Republic, said Carter’s emphasis on human rights had inspired him in prison and undermined the Soviet bloc’s “self-confidence.” Several of Carter’s conservative critics, including former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, later revised their critique of the policy and said his use of U.S. soft power was effective.
Yet Carter also applied old-fashioned hard power to U.S.-Soviet relations. While he took heat for canceling a few popular weapons systems, he increased U.S. defense spending sharply, and his Pentagon developed the B-2 stealth bomber, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and other technologies that later helped Reagan intimidate the Soviet Union.
Under the “Carter Doctrine,” issued after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, he threatened war in the Persian Gulf if oil supplies were disrupted. This arguably deterred the Soviets from further adventurism, though the 1980 U.S. grain embargo didn’t work (the Soviet Union immediately found other grain suppliers) and the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, while popular at first, quickly became a political liability.
Carter was widely depicted as naive for not anticipating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but this was unfair. Even before the occupation, he was secretly arming the mujahideen to fight the previous Soviet-backed government in Kabul. The idea, his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later admitted, was to create a “Soviet Vietnam” to undermine the communist empire. It worked, though the blowback—in the form of the Taliban and former al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden—would prove devastating two decades later.
The Soviet invasion doomed the SALT II treaty, a big Carter priority, in the Senate, but its provisions were informally implemented by both sides and set the stage for later U.S.-Soviet breakthroughs on arms control.
In December 1980, shortly before leaving office, Carter championed Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a chain reaction of resistance to Soviet-backed authorities across Eastern Europe. Walesa later said that Carter’s warning to Moscow to not invade Poland was a critical moment in the struggle.
From left: Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran, U.S. first lady Rosalynn Carter, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter stand for their respective country’s national anthems at the White House on Nov. 15, 1977.Diana Walker/Getty Images
Signs fill the area outside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 27, 1979, during the Iran hostage crisis. Carter’s failure to obtain the release of the 52 American hostages held at the embassy is widely remembered as his biggest foreign-policy setback.Arnaud de Wildenberg/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Carter’s biggest foreign-policy setback came in Iran, but even that should include an asterisk. While the 1979 Iranian revolution turned out to be a world-historic event, there was little if anything Carter could have done to prevent it. As the Shah of Iran said at the time, if he shot protesters in one street (as he did in 1978), they would just pop up the next week on a different street.
Along with a dismal economy and a divided Democratic Party, Carter’s failure to obtain the release of the 52 American hostages held in Tehran helped doom his chances for a second term. He told me in interviews conducted in 2016 for the biography I wrote that if he had shown toughness by bombing Iran, he might have secured his reelection, but the hostages and thousands of Iranians would likely have been killed in the conflict.
Instead, Carter negotiated a peaceful end to the crisis, and the hostages were released just moments after Reagan was sworn in. This made his many miscues—especially his ill-fated decision to allow the Shah into the United States for medical treatment—recede in historical importance.
Carter’s nemesis, former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had withheld oil exports to the United States after the Iranian revolution. This helped jack up oil prices and mar what was otherwise a significant record on energy.
Sadat, Carter, and Begin share a handshake at the White House in 1979 after the signing of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Carter did much more than put solar panels on the roof of the White House (which Reagan took down). By signing the first comprehensive energy package and 15 major environmental bills, he set the United States on a course toward independence from foreign oil. Had he been reelected in 1980, he had even planned to address an obscure problem then described by scientists as “carbon dioxide pollution.” This adds a tragic dimension to his political fate.
No one would argue that Carter belongs on Mount Rushmore. But with his death, it’s time to move past the lazy shorthand—bad president, great ex-president. For all his inspiring selflessness and humanitarian achievements after leaving office, he had much more power to shape the world when he was president. This, then, is an appropriate moment to reassess a decent and farsighted man who has never been given his due.
