Donald Trump once called Jimmy Carter a “nice man” but a “terrible president.”
The president-elect, speaking in 2019, was adopting a dominant narrative about Carter that took root after he reinvented the concept of the post-presidency with his Nobel Prize-winning global humanitarianism, peace-making and democracy promotion.
There’s an element of truth to all caricatures. And tributes to Carter, who died at 100 on Sunday, tended to emphasize his post-White House legacy rather than his troubled spell behind the Oval Office desk.
But this view, promoted especially by Republicans who dismissed Carter’s presidency as the epitome of national malaise, ignores the Georgia Democrat’s lasting achievements that helped shape today’s world.
Carter’s policies in energy and his deregulation of the airline and trucking industries and business had a more lasting impact than his mere four years in office might suggest. And while Ronald Reagan gets credit for winning the Cold War, Carter made key strategic investments in new generation weaponry that put his successor in a position of strength and helped show the Soviet Union it could never prevail. Before Reagan faced down the “Evil Empire,” Carter showed an often-forgotten ruthless streak by leading a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Kremlin’s invasion of Afghanistan.
The depth of Carter’s experience on the global stage – and achievements that endure to this day in the Middle East, Asia and the Western Hemisphere – hold important lessons and point to opportunities for his 21st Century successors, starting with Trump in his second term.
Carter and Trump could hardly have been more different and, despite the president-elect’s gracious tribute on Sunday, swapped fierce public criticism. Carter said in 2019 that it would be a “disaster” if Trump were reelected, and he realized his dream to live long enough to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November. Trump, meanwhile, often mocked Carter on the campaign trail this year – lampooning him as the worst president in history bar one, President Joe Biden.
While Carter tried to reintroduce humility to the presidency, Trump sees the office as furnishing almost unchecked power. The 39th president was pious while the 45th and soon-to-be 47th is often vulgar. Carter pledged to never tell a lie, while Trump made a political career by shredding truth. Carter preached global democracy and human rights, values which the president-elect disdains.
Yet as Trump said in his social media post, only a few men alive “can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History.”
And Carter spent much of his term wrestling with questions that will fall to Trump on January 20 – including how to handle revolutionary Iran, dangerously tense US relations with Moscow, the management of the Panama Canal and how to stop hostilities breaking out between China and Taiwan.
A different age
Much about Carter’s experience and political career seems unfathomable to a modern nation nearly 44 years after he left the White House.
Elaborate national mourning for Carter in the days ahead will close his chapter in American political life; no ex-president living now led the free world in the 1970s and 1980s during some of the most dangerous threats in the Cold War.
And politically, Carter was a relic of a past age.
He was, after all, a southern, evangelical Democrat who built a foundation for an Electoral College majority in 1976 in the Deep South – in states like Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi. No modern Democrat could hope for a similar route to the White House. Reagan, who vanquished Carter in a 1980 landslide, made evangelicals a reliable Republican constituency and ended the Democratic Party’s bid to hold onto Southern conservative Whites while shattering the last remnants of the New Deal coalition.
Carter also did something else that barely seems credible nearly a half century later. He forged historic and lasting peace in the Middle East – an achievement that eluded all of his successors. The Camp David Peace Accords – signed by Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1978 – resulted in the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (R) shakes hands with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (L) at the start of the second trilateral meeting with US President Jimmy Carter. The talks led to the Camp David Accords, signed on September 17, 1978.
The deal’s Achilles’ heel, however, was its failure to resolve the Palestinian question – an omission that echoed through decades of bloodshed. Still, Carter showed that Middle East peacemaking is possible despite dire circumstances – something that might give Trump hope as he considers a fresh quest for an anti-Iran front, including Arab states and Israel, that would dwarf the significance of the Abraham Accords of his first term. And without the Camp David Accords, regular eruptions of regional warfare would have been far worse.
China sends a message to Trump in its condolence message to the Carter family
There will be another moment of history coming full circle when the incoming president dives into China policy.
While Republican President Richard Nixon gets credit for “opening” communist China, it was Carter who landed the breakthrough. He formalized an agreement to establish full diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, paving the way for a historic visit to the US by a cowboy-hat wearing Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping.
The decision meant that the US had to sever formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, which had claimed to be the legitimate government of China, ushering in a decades long US balancing act across the Straits.
Carter’s move also enshrined a long American initiative to peacefully integrate China into the modern world and global economy, which was designed to head off a war with the rising superpower. That effort has been pursued by every American president since but has fallen into disrepute given China’s hard turn under its leader Xi Jinping.
Trump has chosen the most anti-China Cabinet in modern history. But still, the president-elect doesn’t seem ready to abandon the leader-to-leader dialogue that was bolstered by Carter and Deng – he even invited Xi to his inauguration and frequently praised him as “smart” and strong at campaign rallies.
Former US Ambassador to China Max Baucus described Carter as a “visionary” who decided to engage Deng because “he saw China was going to be a major player in the world” and wanted to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. “At the time, it was very much the right thing to do,”
Xi offered effusive condolences after Carter died. It was impossible not to read a message to Trump in his comments when he said that Beijing was willing to “work with the United States to promote the development of China-US relations on the right track of health, stability and sustainability.”
Carter’s respect in China was also important in his post-presidency when he played an instrumental role in defusing a nuclear crisis between North Korea, which was seen as a client of Beijing, and Washington during the Clinton administration.
Trump threatens Carter’s legacy in the Panama Canal
In recent days, Trump has surprisingly reopened what appeared to be one of the most settled aspects of Carter’s legacy: the Panama Canal Treaties of 1977 that resulted in the return of the strategic waterway to the control of its host nation in 1999. At the time, the American policy was partly motivated by a realization about growing resentment toward the United States in the Western Hemisphere and fears in the Pentagon about the feasibility of defending the US Canal Zone in the event of war.
A cargo ship and tugboat sail through the Cocoli Locks at the Panama Canal, in Panama, on August 12, 2024.
Carter assured Americans following the treaty’s signing that the US military would never “be directed against the territorial integrity or the political independence of Panama.” But in a series of holiday season social media posts and remarks, Trump claimed that US merchant ships were being charged exorbitant rates for using the waterway. He claimed the canal was being controlled by China and threatened to demand its return to US control. There is no evidence that American vessels are facing price discrimination, and, while Chinese firms do have interests in Panamanian ports, Beijing does not control passage through the canal.
Trump’s warnings are widely being seen in the context of his broader strategy of using threats to build leverage in diplomatic and trade talks – an approach that would likely horrify Carter. Still, if the president-elect decides to tear up the Panama Canal treaties, he could end up facing many of the same geopolitical complications that Carter tried to avoid.
Both Carter and Trump have wrestled Iran
For years after Carter left office, Democrats were stigmatized by Republicans as weak on national security because of the the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran that did more than anything to rupture Carter’s reelection bid.
A botched attempt to rescue the hostages with a daring special forces mission ended in disaster when a US helicopter crashed in the desert killing eight US servicemen. The calamitous political blowback from the raid was in the minds of many Obama administration officials during the high-stakes, and ultimately successful, mission to kill Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan in 2011.
The Iran hostage crisis allowed Reagan to lambast Carter as an ineffectual leader who weakened US respect abroad – much as Trump did to Biden and Harris in the 2024 race. Similarities with the 1980 campaign also reverberated through this year’s election when Trump likened the inflation crisis and high prices of Biden’s term to the economic blight that settled on the United States in the late 1970s.
In the final humiliation for Carter, the last hostages were released by Tehran on January 20, 1981 – 20 minutes after Reagan was sworn in.
Trump will face his own risky choices on Iran. The Islamic Republic is weaker than it has been for years, after its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas were devastated by Israel following the October 7, 2023, attacks and after the fall of the allied Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
But that weakened position could make Iran rush for a nuclear weapon in a bid to secure its clerical regime – a move that would present Trump with a decision on whether to take military action.
The standoff is a reminder that while the Carter presidency now seems like ancient history, the geopolitical tangles that consumed his administration – involving Iran, the Kremlin, the Western Hemisphere and North Korea – continue to confront presidents across the decades.
