Jimmy Carter Was the True Change Agent 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.

“I believe historians and political observers alike have failed to appreciate the importance of Jimmy Carter’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,” Robert Gates, a former senior intelligence advisor to Reagan (and later Presidents George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s defense secretary) wrote in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. “Carter prepared the ground for Reagan in the strategic arena, in confronting the Soviets and Cubans in the Third World, and in challenging the legitimacy of Soviet authority at home. He took the first steps to strip away the mask of Soviet ascendancy and exploit the reality of Soviet vulnerability. Unfortunately for Carter, until now hardly anyone has known.”

As historian Douglas Brinkley has written, Carter’s tough line on defense—he was the first president to propose missiles in Europe, a policy Reagan later took up—also has been largely forgotten.

Carter authored other world-changing successes in foreign policy that, over time, have come to look even more remarkable and enduring. His 1978 Middle East peace deal between then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat transformed the landscape of the Arab-Israel conflict, allowing Israel to keep peace with its Arab neighbor for nearly four decades. Perhaps more importantly, Israel used that halcyon time to move into the Western world of economies and transcend Arab nations in military and technological strength.

Carter’s 1978 recognition of communist China has also grown in significance over the subsequent four decades. That strategic shift—which also was partly intended to increase leverage on the Soviet Union—helped induce then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to reform and open his country to the world. “Measured by long-term global impact,” Carter wrote in his 2015 memoir, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, “this was probably the most important diplomatic decision I ever made.” Given China’s new aggressive rivalry with the United States and its alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin, it still remains questionable how beneficial this decision was to U.S. interests in the long run.

But the least appreciated of Carter’s achievements, even today, was his unprecedented approach to the titanic struggle of the Cold War.

Although he was mocked for being naive at the time, it was in large part thanks to Carter and his more hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that human rights issues later came to the fore inside the Eastern Bloc, acting like a gradually rising flood that eroded the foundations of Moscow’s power. Helped along by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which authorized “Helsinki monitoring groups” in Eastern­ Bloc countries (perhaps most famously with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which set the human rights movement in motion with a 1977 petition), these newly formed dissident groups during the 1980s undermined the legitimacy of Warsaw Pact communist satellites—and thus the Soviet bloc—from within.

The final victim was the Soviet Union itself—especially after Gorbachev, who became general secretary in 1985, responded to these internal social pressures and the defense threat from Washington by trying to reform a fundamentally unreformable Soviet system with glasnost and perestroika. As even Kissinger, the ultimate realpolitician, later conceded in his memoir Years of Renewal, Helsinki took on “an extraordinary life of its own.” And Carter’s embrace of human rights as a tactic under the Helsinki Accords, Gates wrote, made him “the first president during the Cold War to challenge publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet rule at home.”

Stuart Eizenstat, a senior Carter advisor who published President Carter: The White House Years in 2018, said in an interview that Carter and Brzezinski came to these policies slowly, without comprehending at all what their impact ultimately might be. “Initially Carter saw human rights simply as an expression of American foreign policy rather than a way of totally unraveling the Soviet Union,” he told Foreign Policy. Carter defeated incumbent President Gerald Ford, in fact, by taking on the Kissinger and former U.S. President Richard Nixon notion of a realpolitik acceptance of Soviet power—notoriously prompting Ford to declare in a 1976 debate that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” (In his remarks, which probably cost him the election, Ford was only awkwardly trying to describe Moscow’s reluctant agreement to sign onto vague promises of “human rights and fundamental freedoms” at Helsinki.)

Eizenstat said as time went on and Brzezinski and then-U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance backed Carter in his efforts, the 39th president “began to see that this was a way of, if not totally ending the Soviet Union—nobody could have predicted that—but competing for the hearts and minds of the Third World.”

“Carter relied, in ways no previous president had, on human rights as a centerpiece of his foreign policy,” Eizenstat added. He noted that famed Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (who would take the name Natan Sharansky and become a hard-line Israeli politician) later wrote that Carter had saved his life.

But Eizenstat argued that Carter’s hard-power achievements—his defense buildup—were underestimated as well. Under Carter’s innovative defense secretary, Harold Brown, “all the major weapons systems that were implemented by Reagan were green-lighted by Carter. … For example, the introduction of intermediate nuclear weapons in Europe, which Gorbachev later said convinced them they couldn’t compete.” And it was Carter who began the policy of funding the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan—draining the Soviet Union’s resources and morale in what proved to be its last war. (Although that policy, which Reagan also endorsed and stepped up, ultimately led to the creation of the Taliban.)

The man who played the grand strategist in much of this was Brzezinski, who was often criticized for his anti-Soviet hawkishness but who, in some ways, proved to be the proto-Reagan of the Democratic Party—or at least a proto-neoconservative. Brzezinski began preaching long before almost anyone else at senior levels (particularly Kissinger) that the Soviet system would begin to come apart internally at the seams; therefore, aggressive U.S. engagement with communist governments within Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc was necessary to pull at those seams.

In a series of interviews with me before he died in 2017 at age 89, Brzezinski described the evolution of his thinking going back to his earliest days as a Polish emigre and then as a young academic. In his academic work in the 1950s, Brzezinski began to write of a new way of exploiting Soviet vulnerabilities: subtle counterforce that would mean a policy of politically dividing Soviet bloc countries from Moscow. But almost no one listened to him at the time, he told FP. When he passed on his views to luminaries such as Dean Acheson, former President Harry Truman’s secretary of state—who viewed communists as more or less monolithic—Brzezinski said his arguments were dismissed out of hand.

“Acheson said what I was saying was nonsense. There was nothing to it,” Brzezinski recalled. Brzezinski also differed with Kennan, the great theorist who also foresaw the internal weaknesses of the Soviet system, in a crucial way. “Basically, my point of departure was similar to his, except that he felt things would work out by themselves largely. He was against more military power. I was for more military power because I didn’t want the Soviets to feel they could get away with intimidation. And I was for a more active program of penetration and destabilization but with cautious restraint so it wouldn’t be too overt.”

Kennan “was also convinced that the Soviet system would somehow, by itself, disintegrate, where I thought it had to be stimulated within—in particular, by exploiting the conflict between Russian nationalism and non-Russian nationalisms,” Brzezinski said. “I became convinced that the way to play the game was to back the different national communist regimes and non-Russians within the Soviet Union. That’s what Acheson couldn’t understand.” At the time, the view of the State Department was, naively, that there was a pan-Soviet nationalism, just as there was an American nationalism. “I was suspected of being either a hawk or a naive idealist,” Brzezinski added. “All that people saw was the idea of peaceful engagement [with the Soviet bloc], but they didn’t realize it was a tool, not an end.”

Brzezinski was ultimately vindicated in his prediction that the internal dynamics within the Soviet bloc would tear it apart. Carter, himself, in an interview with me in the fall of 2012 gave most of the credit for this grand strategic concept of confronting the Soviets to Brzezinski, saying it was his national security advisor who thought “to use human rights as political or diplomatic weapons. … That was Brzezinski.” (Indeed, according to Eizenstat, Carter was initially reluctant to push too hard on human rights because he was eager to induce Moscow to sign a second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, a nuclear reduction pact.)

But Carter also said he and Brzezinski were “almost totally compatible” in their views. “Zbig became my most intimate friend. We played tennis. And we knew and liked each other,” the former president told FP. “There were times I had to get Zbig to do things that Cy Vance was psychologically incapable of.”

In some ways, Carter was a victim of his times. He took over the presidency during a time of stagflation and drift, just after the United States’ 1975 retreat from Vietnam—a foreign-policy disaster that, because it was primarily the handiwork of former Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, transformed the image of the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy into one of vacillators and incompetents. Thus hamstrung by history, Carter was viewed as a softie, emblematic of what was seen as an enduring Democratic vulnerability.

And then came the Iran debacle, when Carter gave the exiled shah access to U.S. medical care, and in retaliation, mobs of suddenly radicalized Iranians seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. As the hostage crisis dragged on, Carter came to be seen as helpless and weak. In his 2015 memoir, Carter described the critical decision he made in early April 1980, after the Iranians failed to follow through with an agreement to transfer the hostages. “[O]n April 11, I called my advisers together and we agreed to move ahead with the rescue mission. My last suggestion was that we add another helicopter, giving us two more than necessary,” Carter wrote. But even that wasn’t enough—as the mission was launched, a helicopter crashed during takeoff, swerving into a C-130 plane, killing eight service members and forcing a wan and exhausted president to announce that Operation Eagle Claw (code-named Desert One) had failed. His fate as a one-term president was assured.

Carter never quite got over what he felt was a historical injustice to his reputation. The morning after his 1980 defeat, his former communications chief, Gerald Rafshoon, walked in on the president, slumped in his Oval Office chair and with tears in his eyes. “He said, ‘Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Rafshoon recalled. “He gave the exact number.” Indeed, some of his former associates believe that Carter’s remarkably active post-presidential career as a peace mediator—for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002—was driven at least in part by a desire for vindication. Carter made that clear in 2015, shortly after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, when he was asked if he wished he’d done anything differently in his life.

“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. “If I had to choose between four more years [of the presidency] and the Carter Center, I would’ve chosen the Carter Center.” But, he added, “It could have been both.”