How Jimmy Carter Became a Cold War Hawk
In the popular imagination, Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda” for US foreign policy. In reality, by the end of his term in office, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.
President Jimmy Carter seated in the Oval Office of the White House, 1980. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Seth Ackerman
When the subject of Jimmy Carter’s record in the international arena comes up, the first thing that comes to mind for many people is his championing of a “human rights agenda” for US foreign policy.
But Carter was also very much a Cold War president. The great theme of the first half of his term in office was his effort to reduce tensions with the Soviets through a policy of détente and negotiation, while the great theme of the second half was the unravelling of that position and Carter’s rapid U-turn toward a much more hawkish and aggressive stance.
In his highly praised book The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy, historian Aaron Donaghy retells the story of that period, arguing that in both the case of Carter’s turn to a hard anti-Soviet line and Ronald Reagan’s partial retreat from that policy after an initial period of intense belligerence, the driving force was always concerns about domestic politics.
Donaghy spoke to Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman about the Carter administration’s internal ideological squabbles, the role of the emerging neoconservative movement in shaping the political climate of the late 1970s, and the persistent tendency among politicians and officials throughout the Cold War era to massively overstate the vulnerability of the United States and the power of its adversaries.
It’s an underappreciated fact that Ronald Reagan’s hard-line anti-Soviet foreign policy was actually a continuation of the “second Cold War” turn that began in the last two years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But it’s probably even more underappreciated that Carter himself had initially come into office as a strong proponent of détente and cooperation with Moscow.
Yes. Carter was very much an antiestablishment politician; he was seen as an outsider and that was reflected in the kinds of people he brought into his administration. But you’re right, he was broadly supportive of the détente approach. And if you look at his early rhetoric leading up to the election and after the election he’s talking about a more restrained military posture overseas. He’s talking about engaging with Soviets, reducing defense spending, and reducing strategic nuclear weapons.
And he gives a speech in May, 1977, that really reflects these points. He said, look, it’s time to embrace a new approach. The old-fashioned containment idea is outdated. Not everything can be defined by the US-Soviet rivalry. So it’s time to tone down the obsession with anti-communism and reach out and pursue détente with the Soviets.
The only sticking point, sort of the only problem with that is, of course, that Carter at the same time is also very much pushing his human rights agenda. That kind of cuts against the détente process with the Soviets, as he finds out very early on in his presidency.
Over the first half of the 1970s there had been this unprecedented post-Vietnam ideological polarization within the foreign policy establishment. Looking at the Carter presidency, it almost seems like that polarization was then reproduced within the administration itself, with the constant feuding between Cyrus Vance, his more dovish secretary of state, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his hawkish national security adviser.
Well, this has to do with the context of the time, particularly in light of the US failure in Vietnam. Many strategic analysts perceived the Soviets as essentially taking advantage of détente. They had been negotiating with [Richard] Nixon, but they were also engaging in a military buildup. So in the 1970s, as the Vietnam War is drawing to a close, the national security establishment is very much divided between those who, for example, think America should tone down the obsession with new strategic nuclear systems and those who feel that the US needs to carry out a new military buildup to take the fight to the Soviets and negotiate from a position of strength.
Brzezinski was very much advocating that latter approach, whereas Vance was more interested in finding points of agreement with the Soviets, areas of common ground. So the national security establishment was divided, and in many ways Carter felt trapped between those two schools of thought, between the liberals and the conservatives.
And this is not just a partisan debate. It’s also an intraparty debate because you’ve got hawkish Democrats like [Henry M.] “Scoop” Jackson, who are urging Carter to increase military spending and pushing back against the idea of détente. And of course, Carter needs those conservatives to ratify any agreement he might eventually reach with the Soviets. So it’s a delicate balancing act Carter has to deal with when he takes office.
This is obviously the era when neoconservatism is coming into being as a foreign policy doctrine. Brzezinski is not usually put in the roster of names that come up when people talk about the neoconservatives of the mid-1970s. But in many ways he seems to have points of overlap with them.
Yes. Brzezinski’s posture is animated primarily by his ideological beliefs. He is very anti-Soviet. Obviously he’s of Polish background; Poland was invaded by the Soviet Union when he was a young child and he maintained that very anti-Soviet, anti-communist posture, which would manifest itself right through the Carter presidency. So with him it’s less about a conservative movement and more just pure dislike for the Soviet Union and communism.
But there were areas of common ground between him and the neoconservatives in the sense that he did want Carter to drop the more accommodating approach. Part of the reason for that was political pragmatism. Brzezinski knows that if Carter really wants to see the SALT II arms control treaty ratified and a second term in office, he’s going to have to toughen his negotiating posture because he’s going to need two-thirds of the Senate onboard. So in Brzezinski’s case it’s a mixture of ideology and political pragmatism that’s driving the agenda.
There’s an interesting dynamic that comes across in your book, where Carter keeps trying to deal with the domestic fallout of Moscow’s muscle-flexing moves by talking tough about the Soviet threat. But that only seems to make the political problem worse.
The more Brzezinski urged Carter to take a harsher tone — whether because of Soviet actions in Africa, the hyped-up Soviet brigade in Cuba, or whatever it is — the more it led Carter to up the rhetorical ante with the Soviets. On the one hand, I suppose from their perspective that had the effect of reassuring conservatives on Capitol Hill that he was taking the matter seriously. But at the same time, it undermined public support for his policies. “If the Soviets are being this bad, why are you negotiating a treaty with them in the first place?” So yes, that was a contradiction in the policies he was pursuing.
At the moment Carter came into office, there seemed to be this ubiquitous feeling that — to paraphrase the title of a book about the KGB in that era — the world was going the Soviets’ way. What significance did that have for Carter’s foreign policy?
Certainly the military-strategic balance was overhyped. And in fact a lot of it was later debunked, this idea that the Soviets had the upper hand. In fact, Reagan steps into office and he’s pretty much told by Carter’s outgoing CIA chief that, look, there’s absolutely no Soviet superiority in nuclear arms at all. So a lot of this was carefully cultivated by conservative groups like the Committee on the Present Danger, a hugely successful public lobbying group comprising Democrats and Republicans.
Now, there was an element of truth to it in the sense that the Soviets were in many ways taking advantage of détente. They were building up their military, they were violating the Helsinki Accords, and so on. It’s not as if the Soviets were benign actors here. But the actual threat in terms of the military balance — we now know that was vastly overrated.
But I think that’s a reflection of America’s Cold War overall. The people in power did tend to exaggerate the threat. You could go back to NSC-68 in 1950 [a secret White House policy paper calling for a vast military buildup] or the first incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. We see a common pattern throughout the Cold War in which presidents tend to lean on the side of the doomsday scenario.
To the extent that there has been a distinctive left analysis of American foreign policy in the twentieth century, it’s tended to see America’s Cold War policies as being driven by deep structural imperatives that made it especially determined to intervene in the Third World against leftist-nationalist movements.
But Carter initially came into office seeming to indicate, at least rhetorically, that he thought the US ought to be less paranoid about such movements. And there was even a kind of strategic argument for this that was sometimes articulated by Vance, to the effect if we could just stop preemptively making enemies with these movements, then they would have less reason to turn to Moscow and would thereby become less of a threat to us.
Well, obviously we know how things turned out in that respect. But when you look at the historical record of the Carter presidency, what do you think the evidence shows regarding the extent to which the US was, at least potentially, capable of fundamentally changing its attitude toward left wing or nationalist movements in the Third World?
This is something that I didn’t really go into in the book, but it’s an excellent point. I think the realities of the political situation in the United States and the scrutiny that those supposedly new or radical policies would have been subjected to would have put Carter under a lot of pressure. The pushback to Carter’s policies on that front comes from people like Jeane Kirkpatrick, who argue that right-wing autocrats rather than left-wing autocrats are more compatible with American interests. That becomes a sort of rallying cry for the conservatives in both parties, and in fact Reagan co-opted Kirkpatrick soon afterwards, making her his foreign policy advisor in the 1980 campaign. I guess I think that would’ve been difficult for Carter to do given his political weaknesses.
At a more basic level, how do you think history will view Carter as a foreign policy president?
Traditionally Carter has obviously been seen as one of the less successful presidents, if I could put it in those terms. But a lot of people would argue that Carter had more foreign policy achievements in one term than many presidents have achieved in two terms.
If you look at his achievements, there is the Panama Canal Treaty, normalization of relations with China, the Camp David Accords, the SALT II Treaty (which I think was more of a modest achievement, quite honestly), and also the integration of human rights as a tenet of American foreign policy, even though it was obviously in practice applied unevenly. All of these things I think historians will look at in future years and I think they will reappraise — I think they already are reappraising — Carter’s record in the international arena. And I think they will judge him to be a more successful president than perhaps has been the case to date.
It’s interesting to think about those accomplishments, because during Carter’s presidency there was a ubiquitous feeling that the US was losing power across the board. But when you look at it from a Martian’s perspective and you think, how has this great power been doing in terms of getting other powerful countries to align with it rather than its enemies — this was the era when the US took Egypt into the American camp and away from the Soviet camp; that’s the great power of the Middle East. It took China away from the Soviet camp and into a sort of pro-American camp; that’s the (future) great power of East Asia. The US in this period actually managed to pull several Warsaw Pact countries fairly far in the direction of more independence from Moscow. On paper, it looks like the world was going America’s way, and yet at the time people were perceiving exactly the opposite.
No, absolutely. And again, a lot of this goes back to the Vietnam War. We’ve already talked about the way it divided the national security community. There was a general feeling of doom and gloom. And remember, we haven’t even talked about the Iran hostage crisis, which became a sort of symbol for American decline that was obviously never really the case at any stage in the post-1945 era.
Daniel Bessner and Fredrik Logevall wrote about this in a terrific article, that in the post-1945 era, America was always the world’s leading power by just about every measure: politically, militarily, economically, culturally, scientifically, and technologically. In every single way America was top dog. And when it comes to the threat inflation about the Soviet Union that was going on at the time, we can now see through the records that the figures were inflated, that there were a lot of exaggerations. And again, the point I would make about this is that it all comes back to domestic politics — politicians will always capitalize [on fear] for political gain.