There’s a reason the 39th president is still revered by former Soviet dissidents. Foreign Policy Magazine
“I wish I had sent one more helicopter to get the hostages, and we would’ve rescued them, and I would’ve been reelected,” Carter told reporters at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
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Carter with his top two foreign-policy advisors, Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance (left) and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski |
"The morning after U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan crushed incumbent President Jimmy Carter with a 44-state landslide in 1980, the New York Times reported that demand for a “tougher American foreign policy” was a big part of the outcome. By almost a 2-1 ratio, voters in exit polls said, “They wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union.” Reagan seemed to do just that over the next eight years, with a policy of “peace through strength” and a relentless defense buildup. After the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate on his watch, Reagan was—and still is—mythologized as the primary victor of the Cold War.
"Meanwhile, Carter, who died Sunday at 100, is remembered as a somewhat weak leader, preaching naively about human rights, lamenting energy shortages and malaise in his singsong Georgia accent, and practically being hounded from the White House by the 444-day-long Iranian hostage crisis.
"So, it may seem strange that Carter, even more so than Reagan, is revered to this day among those who fought on the true front lines of the Cold War: the former dissidents of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “They still see him as the messiah,” Svetlana Savranskaya, a scholar of the Soviet period at George Washington University, told me in an interview. “Their eyes shine when they talk about him.”
"Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. Carter did this with a tough but deft combination of soft and hard power. On one hand, he opened the door to Reagan’s delegitimization of the Soviet system by focusing on human rights; on the other hand, Carter aggressively funded new high-tech weapons that made Moscow realize it couldn’t compete with Washington, which in turn set off a panicky series of self-destructive moves under the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
"Carter thus teed up what came to be viewed, unfairly, as his successor’s sole triumph. His repeated avowals of human rights for people behind the Iron Curtain were seen by stunned Soviet leaders, at the time, as outrageous interference in internal matters. (“What kind of man is he with this ‘human rights,’” former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sputtered at one point. “He is always bringing up human rights, human rights, human rights. What for?”) His policy was also criticized as dangerously simplistic by U.S. policy experts who preached realpolitik and detente, among them former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former U.S. diplomat George Kennan.
"But to those behind the Iron Curtain, Carter’s words were a trumpet blast. In a personal note to the Soviet Union’s premier dissident, physicist Andrei Sakharov, in 1977, Carter wrote “human rights is the central concern of my administration.” Sakharov later took that message to then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Labeled an enemy of the state, Sakharov was eventually exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia). But that moment began a great internal battle that would culminate, ultimately, in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Long before Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, it was Carter who transformed U.S. policy from Cold War containment and detente to one of subtle confrontation—changing the world of the last century and also setting the stage for this century." . . .
However: Ask the Venezuelans how great an ex-president Jimmy Carter was
. . ."Now Venezuelans are paying the price, in lost democracy and a ruined country, scattering to the four corners of the globe in their millions, because there's no way to vote a tyrant with a taste for election cheating out of office.
"That's not promoting democracy -- that's fostering dictators. That's disastrous for them as well as us, given that dictators in our hemisphere are costly problems in more ways than one. Had Carter wanted to wreck that place, he couldn't have done a better job. Maybe that's why there won't be too many respects paid to Carter after what he enabled. All he needed to do was tell the truth about what was happening and he didn't do it. He chose the selfies instead."
