The late president did not always perfectly embody his human rights rhetoric while in office, but spent the rest of his life waging peace.
James “Jimmy” Earl Carter, the 39th President of the United States who passed away on December 29, was often referred to with a simple cliché: a forgettable, even failed president, who went on to lead the most successful post-presidency of all his peers.
Carter, a Georgia Democrat, served a single term from 1977 to 1981, losing his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. As a former president, he reinvented himself as a peacemaker and a humanitarian. In a piece for The Guardian, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown described Carter’s Presidency as “the prelude to something else: five decades of public service in support of some of the most challenging of causes … Championing democratic rights everywhere and in doing so, teaching the world that wealth and power mattered less than the opportunity to serve, the nearly 44 years of his post-presidential life and his unimpeachable integrity made him a beacon for moral leadership.”
Nevertheless, Carter’s presidency did lead to some real breakthroughs in the cause for peace. In 1977, he returned the Panama Canal to Panama, eliminating an enduring symbol of U.S. militarism in Latin America. In 1978, Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (SALT II), which saw both nations limit the size and scope of their nuclear forces.
Furthermore, while Richard Nixon is most often associated with opening the U.S.’ relations with the People’s Republic of China, it was Carter that fully normalized relations and recognized the communist authorities in Beijing as the sovereign government of China, establishing productive relations with what would become the world’s second largest economy.
Carter’s most famous foreign policy achievements, though, were the 1978 Camp David Accords, where the U.S. President mediated between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to establish formal peace between their two countries. Egypt became the first Arab nation to recognize Israel.
However, even this most notable of successes had its limitations. The Camp David Accords included provisions meant to set up a fully autonomous Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza which were not followed up on. The concept of “autonomy”, which seemed to preclude a Palestinian state, was criticized. The agreement concerning the territories occupied by Israel was also reached without the participation of Palestinians, and condemned by the United Nations.
Even as he put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy, Carter often could not, or would not, challenge U.S. great power politics or the ideological struggle of the Cold War. As pointed out by Human Rights Watch, “Carter’s human rights records had its shortcomings. At times he failed to condemn abuses of longtime allies – such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia.” Marcos’ predecessor as Filipino President, Diosdado Macapagal, accused the Carter Administration of coddling “an overstaying and corrupt dictatorship against the people,” and accused Carter of failing to use U.S. leverage over the Marcos regime.
Carter also increased support for General Suharto’s regime in Indonesia as it continued its invasion and occupation of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Over 100,000 East Timorese people died as a result of military action and being held in detention camps where many died in a famine.
The Carter Administration was also a supporter of Iran’s last shah, the authoritarian Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and inaccurately referred to Iran during a 1977 visit as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world” shortly before its 1979 Islamic Revolution. Despite this support for the shah, many Iranians blame Carter for Iran coming under the rule of an Islamic regime, saying that he allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to take power.
In response to the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan to prop up a friendly government, Carter stepped up aid to Afghan insurgents with the goal of undermining Moscow’s intervention. The resulting proxy war left the country in taters, setting the stage for the rise of the fundamentalist Taliban regime.
It was after he left the White House, however, that Carter dedicated himself to the peacebuilding and humanitarian work that, in the eyes of many, transformed him into a moral paragon of peace.
He founded the Carter Center, an organization that, according to The Guardian, is credited with helping almost eliminate diseases like river blindness, trachoma, and Guinea worm disease. Most importantly, the Carter Center has carried out crucial election observation work, with the former president himself often leading the charge. When authorities in Panama allied with the previously U.S.-supported Dictator Manuel Noriega rigged the Central American country’s 1989 election, Carter himself strode past armed National Guardsmen to confront officials reading falsified electoral results.
According to the Carter Center, the former U.S. President angrily shouted in Spanish at the officials “Are you honest men, or are you thieves?”
Carter also served as an impromptu diplomat when called to mediate in sensitive negotiations by the U.S. government. In 1994, he traveled to North Korea to help convince Kim Il Sung to put his country’s nuclear program on hold. That same year, he helped negotiate the return to power of Haiti’s democratically elected president, the leftist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been removed by a military coup in 1991.
In his post-presidency, Carter also became increasingly critical of what he saw as aggressive actions by successive Israeli governments. In 2006, he published a book on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter defended his use of the term “apartheid” to describe the situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, saying in an NPR interview that “This is a word that’s a very accurate description of the forced separation within the West Bank of Israelis from Palestinians and the total domination and oppression of Palestinians by the dominant Israeli military.” This was years before the term was more widely used by human rights organizations.
In 2016, after the first election of Donald Trump, Carter wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he called for President Barack Obama to use his remaining time in office to recognize Palestine: “The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”
“I fear for the spirit of Camp David,” he said. “We must not squander this chance.”
For all his work, Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Carter the prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The Committee said that Carter ought to have received the prize after Camp David, even as it acknowledged his foreign policy setbacks in Iran and Afghanistan.
In a world riven by war from Ukraine, to Sudan, to Syria, to Gaza, and by rising political extremism and authoritarianism, the Carter Center’s promise to “wage peace” is more necessary than ever.
Jimmy Carter, like all politicians, was imperfect. He was limited by politics, circumstance, and the very institutions he oversaw. Yet, in a time of strongmen, warlords, and dictators, as noted by the New York Times Editorial Board, America – and the world – need more Jimmy Carters.
