Jimmy Carter was president whose reputation in foreign policy only grew after he left office

Richard Hargy For The Conversation

Belfast: In December 1978, Jimmy Carter – who has died aged 100 – outlined his belief that American strategic decisions abroad should be shaped by an adherence to human rights. “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy … because human rights is the soul of our sense of nationhood.” In the sphere of foreign affairs, Jimmy Carter’s one term as US president (1977-1981) had some notable achievements. The most significant was the 1978 Camp David accords. Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed an agreement that saw Begin agree to relinquish the entire Sinai Peninsula, captured by Israel in the 1967 six-day war, in exchange for peace and full diplomatic relations with Egypt.

This exemplified Carter’s belief in the power of American diplomacy and why US presidents should courageously assume the difficult task of peace-making.

Twenty-five years later, and against the backdrop of the build-up to the second Gulf war, Carter was recognised for his role in the accords and awarded the 2002 Nobel peace prize. The Nobel committee said that while President George W. Bush was planning an invasion of Iraq: “former President Jimmy Carter was awarded the Peace Prize for undertaking peace negotiations, campaigning for human rights, and working for social welfare”.

They added that the prize was in recognition of “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.

On leaving office in January 1981, Carter sought to use his status as a former president to engage in the issues and causes that mattered to him most. He established the Carter Center to pursue his own course of personal diplomacy. Starting in 1982, the centre has monitored more than 110 elections in 39 countries.

Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election and as then president Donald Trump on refused to commit to a peaceful transition should he lose, the Carter Center took the extraordinary step of designating the US as a “backsliding” democracy.

Devout diplomacy

Carter, a devout Christian, maximised his personal relationships with former world leaders to promote democracy and human rights, support scientific work on eliminating diseases, and to mediate where possible to prevent conflict. His activism was not always appreciated by some of his White House successors, both Republican and Democrat. Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth College, said that the former president’s personal brand of diplomacy could often complicate and even contradict contemporary US diplomatic initiatives.

Carter was a member of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders working on peace promotion, social justice, climate change and global human rights. During his years of active membership Carter dedicated significant energy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, visiting the region on a number of occasions to support the Elders’ work.

In the early 1990s the former president became involved in mediation work between the US State Department and several rogue states including North Korea and Libya. In 1994, Carter supported the US government’s diplomatic efforts to resolve an increasingly tense nuclear weapons’ situation with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. Carter met with Kim in June 1994, becoming the first former US president to visit the country. The trip laid the groundwork for an eventual bilateral deal between North Korea and the US. The agreement saw North Korea pledge to freeze its plutonium weapons programme, while the US agreed to offer aid.

Continued work in his 90s

Carter continued to weigh-in on contemporary geopolitical events well into his 90s. He was openly critical when Trump announced in May 2018 that he was withdrawing the US from the Iran nuclear agreement, which had been negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. He called Trump’s move a “serious mistake”. Carter felt that an international agreement made by an American president needed to be binding on all their successors and that by walking away from the Iran deal the US was signalling a “message to North Korea that if the United States signs an agreement, it may or may not be honoured”.

One of Carter’s major accomplishments since leaving office was his centre’s work in health care, and specifically the eradication of Guinea-worm disease. This is a parasitic infection caused by drinking contaminated water. The consequences of the illness, while not fatal, can incapacitate the sufferer and lead to permanent disability.

The Carter Center committed to training over 100,000 village-based health care workers, invested in education programmes and provided water filters to protect people from swallowing the parasite. The results have been highly successful. According to the centre: “incidences of Guinea-worm disease have been reduced from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to 13 in 2023, with the disease being eliminated in 17 countries”.

Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights never went away and his concept of a human-rights focused foreign policy has become permanently encoded in the global conversation. The former president’s work brought him international acclaim, and illustrated why the nation’s leaders should reject short-sighted calculations that risk the US being complicit in human rights violations.

The author is Visiting Research Fellow in International Studies, Queen's University Belfast