Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy legacy is far more complex – and successful – than he gets credit for

Early in his presidency, in May 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame that outlined a new approach to America’s role in the world: Carter said human rights should be a “fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.”

Early in his presidency, in May 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame that outlined a new approach to America’s role in the world: Carter said human rights should be a “fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.” This was a sharp break from the foreign policy practiced by Carter’s predecessor, President Richard Nixon, who, during the Vietnam War, stepped up the secret American bombings of Vietnam’s neighbors Cambodia and Laos, causing untold misery in those countries. Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, successfully pushed to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Three years later, Kissinger also secretly gave a green light to the military junta in Argentina to carry out what’s known as the “Dirty War” to kill between 10,000 to 30,000 of its political opponents. Carter wanted to end such American support for dictators and to emphasize US support for human rights, while also trying to bring peace to the Middle East. His record largely reflects this effort – but the Iran hostage crisis has tended to obscure that Carter was otherwise a successful commander-in-chief on the foreign policy front. Within weeks of taking office, Carter wrote a letter of support to Andrei Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident. While this angered the Soviet regime, it helped to sustain the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, knowing that they had the US president firmly in their corner. Carter’s approach to American foreign policy based on rights and justice also informed his decision to return the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. More than half a century earlier, President Teddy Roosevelt had supported Panama’s secession from Colombia, which resulted in the Americans building and owning the canal that traversed Panama, which enabled ships to avoid traveling an additional several thousand miles around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. But by the time Carter assumed office, the Panama Canal had become a symbol of US colonialism; Carter was determined to fix what he saw as a historical wrong, even if this was not an especially popular move politically in the US. Polling showed that half of Americans didn’t want to give up the canal, and an up-and-coming Republican politician named Ronald Reagan said of the plan: “I’m going to talk as long and as loud as I can against it.”