On September 17, 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter faced a momentous crisis. For nearly two weeks, he had been holed up at Camp David with Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, trying to hammer out a historic peace deal. Although the hard-liner Begin had proven intransigent on many issues, Carter had made enormous progress by going around him and negotiating directly with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, and Legal Adviser Aharon Barak. On the 13th day, however, Begin drew the line. He announced he could compromise no further and was leaving. The talks on which Carter had staked his presidency would all be for naught.
But then, Carter made a personal gesture. Knowing that Begin had eight grandchildren and was exceptionally devoted to them, Carter signed photographs of the three leaders, which he addressed to each grandchild by name, and then personally carried them over to Begin’s cabin, where Begin was preparing to depart. As Begin read the names of his grandchildren, his lips quivered and his eyes watered and he put down his bags. Later that same day, he reached a breakthrough agreement with Sadat on what became the framework for the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty six months later.
In the years after Carter left office, in early 1981, the consensus in Washington was often that his foreign policy had been a failure. Carter began his term warning that he would not succumb to an “inordinate fear of communism,” which many critics took as a sign of weakness. It was also on his watch that the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the ensuing U.S. hostage crisis unfolded. Moreover, Carter’s frequent mixing of soft and hard power made his approach to the world difficult to define and easy to misunderstand. And his accomplishments were quickly obscured by his decisive loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
But as that final day at Camp David makes clear, during his one term in office, Carter left an enduring and positive foreign policy legacy that few presidents who have served two can match. Carter, who has been in hospice for over a year, should take great satisfaction in his track record. He was a liberal internationalist and a peacemaker who shunned the use of military force in favor of diplomacy, an approach that would continue for decades after he left office and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He advocated for free trade and believed that U.S. foreign policy should reflect the country’s best values. And although he was prepared to take a hawkish line on key Cold War policies, he was proud of the fact that no American died in combat during his time in office.
OUTGUNNING MOSCOW
By the time Carter entered the White House in 1977, the Cold War was deeply entrenched. The Soviet Union was aggressively expanding in Africa through various proxy armies in Angola, Ethiopia, Namibia, and the Horn of Africa. It was also building up its nuclear arsenal, further suppressing internal dissent, making it harder for Soviet Jews to emigrate, and exerting absolute control over the communist Eastern bloc. Meanwhile, pro-American, anticommunist dictators flourished throughout Latin America, as well as in parts of Asia and Africa, having been supported by the Nixon and Ford administrations. And the Middle East, still in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was a tinderbox.
At the same time, the military and economic power of the United States and its allies was waning. U.S. defense spending had declined in real terms since the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam four years earlier. NATO members had not invested in their military capabilities. And the United States’ international economic leadership was challenged by a declining dollar and an impasse at the Tokyo Round of international trade negotiations.
Carter had campaigned in 1976 as a foreign policy liberal. He pledged to freeze the number of atomic missiles and warheads, reduce defense spending by $5 billion to $7 billion annually, and withdraw all U.S. ground troops and nuclear weapons from South Korea. He promised to make human rights central to his foreign policy, in contrast to the realpolitik favored by his predecessors, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and Henry Kissinger, who served both of them as secretary of state.
But once he took office, Carter realized that, given the Soviet Union’s rapid military and nuclear buildup, the United States needed more hard power, too, and took steps to augment it. He was often caught between the advice of his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his dovish secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. Instead of cutting defense spending, he raised it, reversing the post-Vietnam reductions and seeking to rebuild the U.S. military; in real terms, he increased defense spending by about 12 percent over his four-year term. In fact, most of the major weapons systems deployed by the Reagan administration had actually been approved by Carter: the stealth bomber, the MX mobile missile, and modern cruise missiles among them. A 2017 Pentagon study concluded that “the Reagan revolution in defense spending began during the later years of the Carter administration.”
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter took an even more hawkish turn. He called the conflict “the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War,” and even his critics applauded his tough stance. He embargoed grain to the Soviet Union, announced a U.S. boycott of the Olympics in Moscow, imposed economic sanctions on the Soviet Union, and reinstituted the draft. Moreover, he asserted that the United States would use force to ensure that oil flowed freely through the Persian Gulf—a concept that would come to be known as the Carter Doctrine and which remains a tenet of U.S. foreign policy today.
Carter also ramped up pressure on the Soviet Union by persuading reluctant European allies, especially German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, to agree to host intermediate nuclear weapons on their soil to counter the Soviet mobile missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later said that this move helped convince him of the need to disarm. Reagan often gets credit for SALT II, the landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty with Moscow that he implemented, but it was Carter who negotiated it.
Carter also challenged the Soviets by cultivating relations with China. Nixon and Kissinger initiated the historic thaw between the United States and China in 1972, but it was Carter who then normalized relations with the People’s Republic—at the time an enemy of the Soviet Union—by granting it full diplomatic recognition in 1979. And although this step required ending formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Carter also created a new relationship with the island under the Taiwan Relations Act, which established the astute concept of “strategic ambiguity,” by which the United States maintains the capability to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion without explicitly promising to do so. The law remains the basis for U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan today.
HUMAN RIGHTS CRUSADER
Although Carter could get tough when needed, the centerpiece of his foreign policy was human rights, as he had promised in his campaign. He profoundly transformed the United States’ relationship with Latin America. He negotiated the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977, which transferred the canal to eventual Panamanian control—rectifying a long-standing grievance for many Latin Americans—and fought the hardest congressional battle of his presidency to get the Senate to ratify the deal. He cut military assistance to dictators, such as Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, Ernesto Geisel in Brazil, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. And he threatened to withhold aid to countries, including Guatemala and Uruguay, if they did not release thousands of political prisoners. In 1977, at the initiative of Congress and with Carter’s enthusiastic backing, the U.S. State Department issued its first annual worldwide Human Rights Report, a public assessment of the state of human rights in nearly 200 countries that has continued under every presidential administration since.
Carter’s human rights policy struck a blow to the Soviet Union. He publicly supported Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, championed the emigration of Soviet Jews, and took up the cause of Soviet Jewish refuseniks such as Natan Sharansky. Soviet diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin, who served as Moscow’s ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, conceded that Carter’s human rights policies “helped end the Cold War” because they “played a significant role in the long and difficult process of liberalization inside the Soviet Union.”
The crown jewels of Carter’s foreign policy were the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that followed in 1979, one of the greatest personal diplomatic achievements by any U.S. president before or since. As a deeply religious Baptist, Carter prioritized the Middle East because he wanted to bring peace to the Holy Land. And as a Cold War realist, he correctly saw the region as a key battleground for influence with the Soviet Union. Plunging headlong into the fiendishly complicated Middle East peace process, he took one of the biggest gambles of his presidency. After the Egyptians and Israelis failed to reach a peace agreement on their own, he invited—over the objections of his advisers—Sadat and Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David. Over 13 excruciating days, Carter personally wrote more than 20 drafts of a peace agreement, mostly by shuttling between the Egyptian and Israeli teams because the relationship between Sadat and Begin was so poisonous. In the end, it took him to the last hours—and the tribute to Begin’s grandchildren—to bring around Begin, who believed that Israel should extend from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
As historic as they were, however, the Camp David accords were a nonbinding framework that was meant to be converted within three months to a legally binding treaty. When six months passed without an agreement, Carter took another risk for peace—again against the advice of his advisers—by going to the region to personally negotiate the treaty, now shuttling between Israel and Egypt with his own draft agreements. At the 11th hour, he reached a deal with Begin in the presidential suite of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that ended 40 years of conflict between the two countries. It laid the foundations for a bilateral peace that endures today—even amid the terrible fighting that has engulfed the region since October 2023.
THE IRANIAN BLIND SPOT
No fair assessment of Carter’s foreign policy legacy can avoid his dealings with Iran. In the space of a few weeks in early 1979, the Islamic Revolution transformed Iran from a decades-long ally to a self-proclaimed enemy. Later that same year, radical Iranian students breached the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage for 444 debilitating days. Carter made many mistakes leading up to the crisis. His administration’s focus on the peace process between Egypt and Israel left Iran in a blind spot. The president had called Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza an “island of stability” in a toast to the Iranian leader on New Year’s Eve 1977, just a year before he was forced to leave the country. In failing to predict the Islamic Revolution, the U.S. intelligence community saddled Carter with the worst intelligence failure in modern American history. The CIA had failed to notice that the shah had lost support from all segments of society and did not know that he had incurable cancer. Just six weeks before the shah fled, the agency told the president that Iran was not primed for a revolution.
Some critics, including Kissinger, believe that Carter’s human rights policy undermined the shah. But Carter never publicly criticized the shah’s human rights record, despite massive violations by Iran’s intelligence service, and only privately advised him to reach out to moderate elements in Iranian society. Instead, Carter assured the shah that the United States would support a military crackdown to quell the growing unrest, sent General Robert Huyser to back the shah’s last prime minister over Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and authorized covert action to undermine Khomeini’s regime. Nonetheless, despite American missteps, it was the shah, and not Carter, who lost Iran. It is no fairer to blame Carter for the collapse of Iran’s pro-Western government than to blame President Dwight Eisenhower for losing Cuba to Fidel Castro.
When it came to getting the U.S. hostages back, Carter ultimately chose diplomacy over hard power. He put the safety of the hostages first by rejecting advice Brzezinski and I gave to mine or blockade the harbors of Kharg Island, from where most of Iran’s oil was exported. In the end, Carter negotiated their release but only after he lost the election. There is also now evidence that William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager and eventually his CIA director, played a hand in slowing the release of the hostages. In 2023, Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes told The New York Times that Casey conveyed to Iran—through a proxy—that it would get a better deal from a Reagan administration if they kept the hostages until after the U.S. presidential election. When I asked James Baker, who became Reagan's chief of staff and then his treasury secretary, about Casey’s involvement in the Iran hostage crisis, he told me, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t believe about Casey.” Baker also admitted that Casey stole Carter’s presidential debate book, which I had prepared. Casey, who died in 1987, denied the accusation. Whatever the case, the delay in a hostage deal probably cost Carter the presidency.
THE LAST PEACEMAKER
Following his defeat, Carter created the Carter Center, a nonprofit that carries out many of the unfinished initiatives of his presidency, such as promoting peace and fighting disease. Under his leadership, the center monitored over 115 elections, hosted dialogues between Israelis and Palestinians, and contributed to the near eradication of Guinea worm, a parasitic disease. In 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm worldwide; by 2023, there were 14. In their own retirement, President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton have both emulated the Carter Center’s model. Working with Habitat for Humanity, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter also helped over 4,000 families in 14 countries move into safe, affordable housing.
Had Carter been reelected, he would have fought to ratify the SALT II nuclear arms treaty. (The agreement was never ratified, though both the Soviet Union and the Reagan administration honored the deal.) He also would have pressed for more comprehensive nuclear arms agreements with the Soviet Union, as Reagan did. Most important, he would have pushed for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. The Camp David accords and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty stipulated that Israel would grant “full autonomy” to the Palestinians, but the implementation of that article would have required another agreement, which his administration had already begun. Unfortunately, Reagan did not want to use the political capital Carter was willing to expend to secure greater Palestinian rights, which might have led to a Palestinian state and a more peaceful Middle East.
Even with his missteps in Iran, Carter’s foreign policy made a lasting positive mark on the world. Traces of Carter’s approach can be seen in the Biden administration today: the combination of hard and soft power, the focus on human rights and democracy, the courage to stand up to aggression from Moscow, and the continued commitment to strategic ambiguity with China. And of course, several presidents since Carter have tried to pull off a Middle East peace deal that matches Camp David’s success. It may in part be the failure of later administrations to accomplish such a feat that accounts for the terrible conflict the region finds itself in today. More than ever, the Middle East desperately needs the brave, deft diplomacy Carter was able to deliver.
CORRECTION APPENDED (MAY 20, 2024)
An earlier version of this article misstated James Baker’s role in the Reagan administration. He served as chief of staff and treasury secretary under Reagan, not as secretary of state—a post he later held under President George H. W. Bush.
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