The former President Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter was elected by a convincing margin over the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 and served one term. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, passed away in November 2023. 

His presidency is perhaps among the most misunderstood in recent American history. 

Unique among presidents, Carter’s post-presidential years will likely be the focus of much of the forthcoming commentary on his life. If we agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “greatness is the perception that virtue is good enough,” then on that basis, Carter’s post-presidential life was indeed great.

The caricature that emerged of Carter’s presidency—one that has been lodged in the popular imagination for some 40 years—has always been misleading. Carter, so we are told, was idealistic but weak. The truth is far more interesting—though ultimately the direction his foreign policy took does not redound to Carter’s credit. 

No real discussion of U.S. foreign policy under Carter is possible without an in-depth consideration of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who broke into Carter’s inner circle early on. Like his fellow emigre Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was ambitious to the point of shamelessness. During the ’76 campaign, Brzezinski, according to the former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, also made himself available to a number of Carter’s opponents including Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh.

Some saw trouble brewing early on. Robert Lovett, one of Washington’s legendary “Wise Men” and Harry Truman’s fourth and final secretary of defense, sniped, “We really shouldn’t have a national security advisor like that who isn’t really an American.”

Lovett was righter than he knew. In the decades that followed, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was flooded with Brzezinski proteges, including Bill Clinton’s foreign-born secretary of state, Madeleine Korbel Albright. The parochial concerns of bureaucrats, operatives and think-tank fixtures with competing national loyalties have had an undue influence on American foreign policy in the decades since—even resulting in the impeachment of a sitting president in December 2019 on the grounds that these people did not like what their ostensible boss, the president, was saying to a foreign leader.

The importance of a new president choosing the right people or the right combination of people cannot be overstated. Carter fumbled early on when, under pressure from the growing caucus of neocons (who were still, in late 1976 and early 1977, mainly Democrats, before jumping ship for Reagan a four years later) led by Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, he decided not to go with his first choice for secretary of state, the former under secretary of state George Ball. 

In a conversation with the historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002, Carter recalled his concerns over whether Ball could win Senate confirmation; after all, “he had the courage to question aspects of America’s attachment to Israel.” And Ball’s “outspokenness on the Middle East would have made it difficult for him to pass confirmation hearings. So I chose Cyrus Vance.”

Brzezinski would likely have had a harder time besting Ball, whose lonely, principled, and prescient opposition to the war in Vietnam as a member of  Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle is too often forgotten. Carter’s first mistake, then, was to hand the Israel lobby a scalp without so much as a fight. The second mistake was making Brzezinski primus inter pares among his advisers. 

After the election, Carter’s campaign manager Hamilton Jordan was quoted as saying, “If after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” But as Brinkley wryly notes, “Both men, as it turned out, were selected for those posts, and Jordan never quit.”

Brzezinski’s scholarly work on the Soviet Union should have been a red flag. He was a leading proponent of what was known as the “totalitarian school,” which posited that the internal dynamics of the Soviet system largely explained its behavior abroad. Scholars like Brzezinski drew a straight line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no allowances were made for the vagaries of succeeding Soviet regimes. The late professor of Russian politics at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, who was a leading theorist of the rival “revisionist school,” had crossed paths with Brzezinski at Columbia in the 1960s. Cohen was critical of what saw as the “deterministic quality” of the scholarship produced by high profile members of the “totalitarian school” such as Brzezinski and Harvard’s Adam B. Ulam, who, like Brzezinski, was a Polish immigrant. 

Brzezinski, drawing that straight line, had posited that, “Perhaps the most enduring achievement of Leninism was the dogmatization of the party, thereby in effect both preparing and causing the next stage, that of Stalinism.” 

Yet, as Cohen later noted, 

the totalitarianism school became consensus Sovietology on the basis of generalizations that claimed to explain the Soviet past, present and future. It turned out to be wrong, or seriously misleading, on all counts.

The myopia that characterized Brzezinski’s approach to U.S.–Soviet relations was perhaps to be expected from the son of a Polish diplomat. Under Brzezinski, Kissinger and Nixon’s detente (a policy they borrowed from France’s Charles de Gaulle) never stood a chance. And his misreading of Soviet history led, quite naturally, to mistakes down the line. 

The power that Brzezinski wielded on behalf of “the Captive Nations” lobby (i.e. emigres from the nations comprising the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) led Carter into some perilous cul-de-sacs. And nowhere was this more so than in Afghanistan, which ranks among the Carter administration’s most serious foreign policy bungles.

What happened in Afghanistan in 1979–1980 was essentially a Soviet overreaction to American meddling that was met with a subsequent American overreaction. The sequence—if not the interpretation—was confirmed by Brzezinski himself in a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur.

“According to the official version of history,” said Brzezinski,

CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, 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.

Once the Soviets intervened to protect the regime of their client, the Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki, the Carter administration, at Brzezinski’s urging, convinced itself that Moscow’s ultimate aim was to dominate the Persian Gulf. Carter melodramatically pronounced the invasion as “the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War.” Yet, as the distinguished Cold War scholar John Lamberton Harper notes, “to consider such a move plausible meant assuming Moscow believed it could overcome the combined resistance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Once again, it required doubting not only the Russians’ declarations but their sanity as well.”

The Carter Doctrine, authored by Brzezinski, was the formal policy response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the same way the Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to a perpetual role in Europe, the Carter Doctrine transformed the Persian Gulf a U.S. protectorate in all but name. Carter’s policy was unveiling during his final State of the Union address in January 1980 in which he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Our decades-long misadventure in the Greater Middle East had begun in earnest.

Brzezinski passed away in 2017 at the age of 89, yet his approach to foreign affairs remains broadly influential. For years, he served as a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and as a fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. He helped spawn generations of imitators who staff the think tanks, graduate schools of international relations, and the national-security bureaucracy today. While a number of his later books correctly castigated the errors of the Bush administration and eloquently warned of the increasing fragility of the American social order, it would be hard to argue with the withering judgement of Hodding Carter, a journalist who served as State Department spokesman under Cyrus Vance. He condemned Brzezinski as “a second-rate thinker in a field infested with poseurs and careerists [who] never let consistency get in the way of self-promotion or old theories impede new policy acrobatics.”

No account of Carter’s foreign policy would be complete without a consideration of his administration’s policy toward Iran. 

By the late 1970s, the regime of the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a stalwart U.S. ally since the CIA-engineered overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, was teetering on the precipice of collapse. In November 1978, George Ball was summoned back to Washington at the request of the president in order to provide an objective analysis of the unfolding situation in Tehran.

Ball had long experience in dealing with Iran, going back to his days as under secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson; from his perch as a partner at Lehman Brothers, he had kept in intermittent contact with the shah in the ensuing years.

What Ball saw upon returning to Washington did not encourage him. Assigned to an office in the NSC, Ball witnessed the dysfunction that plagued the policymaking process under Brzezinski, who, as Ball recalls, “was systematically excluding the State Department from the shaping or conduct of our Iranian policy. To ensure the Department’s insulation, he admonished me, immediately on my arrival, that I should not talk to the State Department’s Iranian desk officer, because he ‘leaked’—an instruction I, of course, immediately disregarded.”

Ball handed his report on the situation to the president and the NSC just over a year later, December 1979. He recommended that Washington help the shah accept the reality of his “precarious power position and help him face it.” Carter should, Ball advised, make clear that the only chance he had to “retain our support is for him to transfer his power to a government responsible to the people.”

But Carter and Brzezinski wouldn’t budge. 

As Princeton’s Richard Falk observed at the time, “when most others in Washington had given up on the shah, Brzezinski continued his plot for survival.”

The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 66 American hostages was a direct consequence of the decision by Carter (with the support of, among others, Kissinger, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Brzezinski) to admit the shah into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. The decision was made over the objections of the State Department’s man in Tehran, chargé d’affaires L. Bruce Laingen, who opined in a memo that “with the power of the mullahs growing, admission of the shah, even on humanitarian grounds, might provoke a severe disturbance.”

By April 1980, Vance felt he had no choice but to resign. He was and remains only the third secretary of state to do so. The proximate cause was Vance’s opposition to Carter’s decision to send in American forces to rescue the hostages.

The deeper issue was the betrayal and unprofessionalism of Carter and his national security team, led by Brzezinski, which called a meeting of the National Security Council to approve the ultimately ill-fated hostage rescue plan while Vance was on vacation in California. In this, Vance was also betrayed by his deputy, Warren Christopher, later to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, who declined to inform Vance of the meeting until after Vance had returned to Washington. The mission failed. On April 24 one of the eight rescue helicopters collided with a parked C-130 transport plane in the Iranian desert. The doomed mission likely also doomed Carter’s prospects for reelection. 

Carter’s reputation as a peacemaker rests largely on his successful brokering of the Camp David Accords and his post-presidential diplomacy. His reputation also benefited thanks to his elevation of “human rights” as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy which has often been the object of praise by scholars and foreign policy practitioners. Indeed, the moralizing that has become a defining feature of American foreign policy in recent decades has it roots in the Carter years.

The problem, as we have come to see, is that such sentiments are too easily appropriated by those who wish to see the U.S. forever embroiled in far-off sectarian conflicts in the Middle East. It was, of course, under the cover of such “humanitarian” concerns that Brzezinski’s heirs in the Obama national security apparatus, including Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and, above all, Hillary Clinton, fought tooth and nail for the disastrous policies of regime change in Libya and covert war in Syria.

By the end of his presidency he had come around to fully embracing Brzezinski’s worldview. The decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s blundering military campaign in Afghanistan was a deeply unserious way for a great power to conduct itself—not least because it was the actions of the Carter administration that precipitated the Soviet invasion.

None of this was lost on a sizable number of Democrats who, by the time Carter ran for reelection, had urged Ted Kennedy to challenge him in the Democratic primary. Perhaps foremost among Carter’s critics within the Democratic establishment was the historian and former Kennedy adviser, Arthur M. Schlesinger. He denounced Carter in the pages of the New Republic, writing, “1980 has been his banner year for blunders; and what is finally destroying his immunity is less his confusion in grand strategy, impressive as this has been, than his incorrigible incompetence in detail.”

Carter, who had easily bested Schlesinger’s friend in the primaries, owed his resurrection in the polls to, in Schlesinger’s words, “two international crises—Iran and Afghanistan—that he himself helped bring about.”

Still worse, with the passage of time, Carter’s presidency more and more resembles that of a more recent vintage—that of another inexperienced Southern governor who campaigned on cleaning up a sordid mess left by his predecessor. Like Carter, that president was captured by hardline neoconservative advisers and schemers put in place around him. His experienced and moderate secretary of state got frozen out—indeed, had circles run around him by the fanatical hardliners within the national security bureaucracy. The president, on the advice of these hardliners, stumbled and overreached and committed the U.S. to a series of objectives it could not possibly, even plausibly, fulfill. 

The big difference, of course, is that George W. Bush got elected to a second term. But the policies—particularly in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf— adopted by Carter on the advice of Brzezinski paved the way for what was tragically to come some two decades later, in the autumn of 2001.

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