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The following article was co-authored by Ivana Nikolić Hughes and Peter Kuznick, originally published in American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) on January 16, 2025.
“Carter’s 42-year post-presidency was a different story, that of a towering moral presence in his years out of office—a man who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received in 2002.”
In 2019, Jimmy Carter shared his thoughts on China with the congregants at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody?” Carter asked. “None. And we have stayed at war.” The U.S., he calculated, had enjoyed a paltry 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making it “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” repeatedly trying to force others to “adopt our American principles.” “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” he asked rhetorically, noting that China had built some 18,000 miles of high-speed rail while the U.S. had “wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending.
“The difference,” Carter told the congregation, “is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you’d probably have $2 trillion left over. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.” According to the Costs of War Project at Brown, the accurate figure for the amount of money the U.S. has spent on its post-9/11 wars is closer to $8 trillion.
Jimmy Carter is deservedly being honored as he is being laid to rest for his truthfulness and integrity, traits especially appreciated given that he took office in 1977 following years of mendacity surrounding the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Watergate, and the revelations of wrongdoing exposed in the extraordinary Church Committee hearings. But the Carter of the last couple of years of his presidency bore little resemblance to the man who challenged American hubris in his 2019 comments on China or the mythic image being etched into Americans’ memory in the days since his passing.
Carter is being remembered as a humble Georgia peanut farmer who rose to the governorship and then the presidency on the strength of his character and his reputation as an enlightened pro-Civil Rights southern governor. Billboards have popped up around the country with his image and the word “Character” with the letters C-a-r-t-e-r highlighted.
Most obituaries, however, fail to mention that his rise to the highest office also came by way of nominating super hawk and neocon favorite Henry “Scoop” Jackson, “the senator from Boeing,” for president at the 1972 Democratic Convention. Soon after, Carter joined the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller with the purpose to bolster international capitalism. The Commission’s Executive Director Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Columbia professor and son of a Polish diplomat, recognized Carter’s potential and took him under his wing, eventually serving as his foreign policy advisor and speechwriter during the 1976 campaign. Carter ran as an outsider, but quickly appointed 26 fellow Trilateralists to his new administration, including staunch anti-communist Brzezinski as National Security Advisor, fair-minded Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, and liberal Atlanta mayor Andrew Young as UN Representative.
Despite being surrounded by many conservative advisors, Carter’s initial priorities were fairly progressive. He sought to cut defense spending and decried the nuclear hypocrisy involved in the U.S. asking other countries “to forgo nuclear weapons” while the U.S. kept building them. In his inaugural address, he pledged not only “to limit the world’s armaments” but to “move this year toward the ultimate goal—the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” He even spoke truthfully about Vietnam, promising never to repeat the “false statements and sometimes outright lies” his predecessors had used to deceive Americans about the war.
His presidency got off to a strong start. On his first full day in office, he unconditionally pardoned hundreds of thousands of young Americans who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. On March 15 of that year, he signed a presidential directive instructing administration officials “that we should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba” and later that year on September 1, the two countries each opened an interest section in the other’s capital. Six days later, Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, gradually turning the canal back to Panama after seven decades of U.S. control. Between 1977 and 1979, he slashed military aid from $210 million to $54 million, cutting off some of the most violent and repressive governments in the Southern Cone and Central America. In 1978, he achieved his most memorable foreign policy success in negotiating the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In December of that year, Carter announced that the U.S. would establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and end them with Taiwan. Even as late as 1979, Paul Warnke, Carter’s choice to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, secured passage of the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he nominated more women and members of minority groups to the federal judiciary than all his predecessors combined. He promoted conservation. He established the Departments of Energy and Education. When he left office, the national debt stood below $1 trillion. That number would triple under Reagan and has now skyrocketed to $36 trillion.
But there was another, more troubling, side to the Carter presidency, largely engineered by Brzezinski, who aimed to infect Carter with his own hatred of Soviet communism. He insisted, from day one, on giving the President’s daily briefings by himself with no one else present and wrote in his memoirs that he was soon gratified to hear his own words coming out of Carter’s mouth. Brzezinski bragged about being “the first Pole in 200 years in a position to really stick it to the Russians” and urged Carter to use the Soviet Union’s record on human rights to discredit it on the world stage, even though the Soviets had made significant progress in the preceding two decades. Brzezinski wrote to Carter that a president must be “feared” and urged him “to pick some controversial subject on which you will deliberately choose to act with a degree of anger, even roughness, designed to have a shock effect.” Carter chose to denounce Soviet behavior in Africa, leading Brzezinski, an outspoken foe of any arms control agreement with the Soviets, to exult on several occasions that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.”
There was more. He supported repressive regimes in Iran and El Salvador and the genocidal Pol Pot government in Cambodia, and reactionary movements like the Contras in Nicaragua, governments that openly trampled on the human rights that Carter properly extolled. Carter made serious, deadly, and dangerous foreign policy decisions, repeatedly favoring Brzezinski’s hawkishness to Vance’s diplomacy. The Carters spent New Year’s Eve 1977 at an obscenely lavish dinner for 400 guests in Tehran where Carter proclaimed his loyalty to the Shah, who had come to power in a 1953 CIA-run coup that toppled the extremely popular, democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, a former Time Man of the Year who the U.S. ambassador reported had the “backing of 95 to 98 percent of the people.” “There is no leader,” Carter toasted the Shah at the New Year celebration, “with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship.” Little more than a year later, Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, whom Carter then welcomed into the United States under pressure from Brzezinski, Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger. Outraged Iranian students stormed the American Embassy and seized more than 50 hostages they held for 444 days, putting a final nail in the coffin of the Carter Presidency, in addition to the almost 15 percent inflation resulting from Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker’s extreme measures to curb inflation. In El Salvador, following the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, left-wing insurgents were close to overthrowing the government and seizing power, but Carter restored military aid to the government, opening the door for much worse cruelty enabled by Ronald Reagan.
However, the most appalling and outrageous betrayal of decency occurred in Afghanistan where Brzezinski prevailed upon Carter to to unleash an insurgency against the pro-Soviet government that came into power following a coup in 1978. Afghanistan was one of the world’s poorest countries where life expectancy stood at 40 years and only one tenth of the population was literate. Recognizing this, the new Soviet-friendly rulers attempted to reform the backward nation, instituting programs for women’s education, land reform, and industrialization that angered the Muslim zealots or mujahideen. Initially loathe to arm and train these fanatics, who murdered teachers found to educate women, sometimes skinning them alive, Carter finally gave in to Brzezinski, who was intent on giving the Soviets “their own Vietnam.” On July 3, 1979, Brzezinski wrote a note to Carter predicting that the new U.S. policy of aiding the mujahideen would “induce a Soviet military intervention.”
The ploy worked. On Christmas Eve, almost six months after U.S. aid began, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent in over 100,000 Soviet troops to restore order. Though the U.S. had deliberately provoked the invasion and American leaders secretly celebrated, Carter publicly called it “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Within weeks, he announced the Carter Doctrine, threatening the Soviets with war if they intervened in the Gulf region. In case Carter’s warning wasn’t entirely clear, the following month, Assistant Secretary of State William Dyess reiterated the threat, declaring, “The Soviets know that this terrible weapon has been dropped on human beings twice in history and it was an American president who dropped it both times.” In actions that warmed the cold cockles of Brzezinski’s heart, Carter withdrew the U.S. Ambassador from Moscow, took SALT II off the table, pulled the U.S. team out of the upcoming Moscow Olympics, and deployed Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to Beijing to discuss establishing military ties. U.S. and Saudi money flowed into Pakistan to support the insurgents, which led, under Reagan, to the arming, funding, and training of the zealots who attacked the United States on 9/11.
Jimmy Carter came to office promising to promote human rights and democracy and cut military spending. He failed on all fronts. Military spending shot up from $115 billion in his first budget to nearly $180 billion in his final one. The Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was at nine minutes to midnight when he entered office in 1977 and at four minutes to midnight when he left in January 1981. As Anne Cahn detailed in her book Killing Détente, “By the 1980 presidential election, the choice in foreign and defense policy was between that of the Carter administration, which favored the MX missile, the Trident submarine, a Rapid Deployment Force, a ‘stealth’ bomber, cruise missiles, counterforce targeting leading to a first-strike capability, and a 5 percent increase in defense spending, and that of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, who favored all of these plus the neutron bomb, antiballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber, civil defense, and an 8 percent increase in defense spending.” Carter opened the door to the even more harrowing excesses and brutality of the subsequent Reagan administration.
Carter’s 42-year post-presidency was a different story, that of a towering moral presence in his years out of office—a man who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he received in 2002. The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn founded in 1982, advances international peace, democracy, human rights, and understanding. Carter worked to ease conflicts around the globe, including on the Korean Peninsula, and in Darfur, Syria, Ukraine, and Palestine. He championed Palestinian rights and a two-state solution, boldly condemning egregious abuses in the Israeli-occupied territories in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Papering over the errors, betrayals, hypocrisies, and reversals of the Carter Presidency, as much of the posthumous commentary has done, does not serve his legacy or advance the causes he so passionately espoused. If we fail to comprehend how the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy establishment, which Eisenhower labeled the military-industrial complex and Obama-advisor Ben Rhodes called the “blob,” transformed a well-meaning young president, committed to creating a more just and peaceful world, into a hardline Cold Warrior who betrayed many of his principles, we lose an opportunity to learn from Jimmy Carter’s errors and advance the dream that drove him to become the moral force we rightly remember him as.
Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.
Ivana Nikolić Hughes is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.
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