A smarter Jimmy Carter?

[The Lone Centurion]

There's limited room for maneuver, but there's no reason that Carter couldn't have been a bit smarter as president. I was born during the Carter administration so I'll hand it over to you as to what happens.

 

[OHC]

What do you mean by smarter? Better at carrying out policy goals?

Better coordination with Congress is the stumbling block as far as domestic policy goes; he had a very poor relationship with the Democratic caucus, many of whom considered him too conservative. (And an even worse relationship with the unions that still had a lot of heft in the party.) That might be hard to do, though, since his political priorities genuinely didn't line up with theirs - Humphrey-Hawkins, for instance, was something he was kind of forced to embrace on the campaign trail and he did his best to water it down as it made its way into law.

He'd have more room to be "smarter" on foreign policy. His emphasis on human rights was as much an electoral strategy as it was personal preference - detente was unpopular, but so was war, so he split the difference and criticized the Soviet Union while refraining from military action. Taking a more firmly dovish or hawkish position could have helped him be more decisive in emergencies. For instance, he could have either dealt with the Iranian Revolution more gently and averted the hostage crisis, or devoted a larger and better prepared military force to the rescue operation.

 

[Md139115]

As I just said in the other place two days ago, America has had one major nuclear power scare, it has also had one President who happened to be a former nuclear reactor operator, these two things happened to exist in the same time and place... yet virtually nothing was done to capitalize on it. Carter could have killed the public panic stone dead in a second, but he never did.

 

[Cook]

he could have either dealt with the Iranian Revolution more gently...

By 'gently', do you mean he could have listened to the State Department, the US ambassador to Iran, the Pentagon, their senior advisor in Iran and the Iranian Prime Minister, all of whom told him point blank and without any ambiguity that allowing the former Shah into the United States would be "disastrous to US-Iranian relations" - then America's most important relationship in the Middle East - and would be guaranteed to "generate a violent reaction" against US citizens (58,000 were in Iran at the time), businesses and symbols of the United States government including the US embassy (at the time the largest US embassy in the world)?
Would 'gently' also include not sending General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran in January 1979 with orders to engineer a coup against the new revolutionary government, then only days old, which at the time included a strong liberal faction and that had just sent representatives to reestablish good relations with the United States? Huyser, by the way, knew it was a fool's errand as soon as he touched down in Tehran and promptly left the country.
Carter's choices in Iran weren't between 'gentle' and 'firm', they were between exercising a modicum of common sense, in what was then the United States most important foreign relationship, and being a hair-brained fool who ignores the advice of ,not some, but all of his foreign policy and military advisors.

 

[OHC]

By 'gently', do you mean he could have listened to the State Department, the US ambassador to Iran, the Pentagon, their senior advisor in Iran and the Iranian Prime Minister, all of whom told him point blank and without any ambiguity that allowing the former Shah into the United States would be "disastrous to US-Iranian relations" - the America's most important relationship in the Middle East - and would be guaranteed to "generate a violent reaction" against US citizens (58,000 were in Iran at the time), businesses and symbols of the United States government including the US embassy (at the time the largest US embassy in the world)?
Would 'gently' also include not sending General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran in January 1979 with orders to engineer a coup against the new revolutionary government, then only days old, which at the time included a strong liberal faction and that had just sent representatives to reestablish good relations with the United States? Huyser, by the way, knew it was a fool's errand as soon as he touched down in Tehran and promptly left the country.

Yes.

 

[Makemakean]

He'd have more room to be "smarter" on foreign policy. His emphasis on human rights was as much an electoral strategy as it was personal preference - detente was unpopular, but so was war, so he split the difference and criticized the Soviet Union while refraining from military action. Taking a more firmly dovish or hawkish position could have helped him be more decisive in emergencies. For instance, he could have either dealt with the Iranian Revolution more gently and averted the hostage crisis, or devoted a larger and better prepared military force to the rescue operation.

He was smart on foreign policy, something which is sadly forgotten. He managed to negotiate a normalization with China on terms that made China de facto accept Taiwanese independence. Deng at the top and all the way down were practically dead set to walk away from any negotiations unless the United States stopped providing the backing through sales of arms to Taiwan. Yet Carter and his team managed to square that circle.

 

[OHC]

He was smart on foreign policy, something which is sadly forgotten. He managed to negotiate a normalization with China on terms that made China de facto accept Taiwanese independence. Deng at the top and all the way down were practically dead set to walk away from any negotiations unless the United States stopped providing the backing through sales of arms to Taiwan. Yet Carter and his team managed to square that circle.

He did have quite a few impressive accomplishments - let's not forget Camp David or Panama either. But he made some blunders that became disasters for the US and for the world down the line, like his treatment of Iran, his alienation of the Sandinistas, and his decision to dive into a quiet quagmire in Afghanistan. It might not be strictly realistic for him to do better (after all, which president since has?) but there is always room for improvement in AH.

 

[Cook]

his decision to dive into a quiet quagmire in Afghanistan.

"dive into a quiet quagmire"?

Let's see:
- no US troop onvolvement;
- no US casualties;
- no significant US expenditure during his administration, and;
- successfully forced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from a critical position that threatened America's key ally Pakistan and the Straits of Hormuz.

If you are trying, in some perverse way, to lay blame for the Taliban at Carter's feet then you are drawing a very long bow, and your aim is wildly off; that happened much later when, as Charlie Wilson said, America "fucked up the end game."

 

[OHC]

"dive into a quiet quagmire"?

Let's see:
- no US troop onvolvement;
- no US casualties;
- no significant US expenditure during his administration, and;
- successfully forced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from a critical position that threatened America's key ally Pakistan and the Straits of Hormuz.

If you are trying, in some perverse way, to lay blame for the Taliban at Carter's feet then you are drawing a very long bow, and your aim is wildly off; that happened much later when, as Charlie Wilson said, America "fucked up the end game."

I am, although of course Reagan, Charlie Wilson, and the intelligence services deserve blame too. Funding monsters like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who tore up the country so badly that people turned to the Taliban to turf them out, was always a bad idea. (And they were the ones we were funding; sure, Massoud got some money, but he was seen as a less effective fighter, and since the ISI was the middleman for most of the aid it sure wasn't going to go to him.) If we wanted to preserve American interests, we could have fortified Pakistan or, as you mention above, cultivated better relations with Iran. Meanwhile, America could have benefited in soft power terms - in the Islamic world and elsewhere - from the Soviets making a mockery of their claims to anti-imperialism. Instead we spent a decade throwing good money after bad, ruining our image in Afghanistan for the future.

Charlie Wilson was wrong; we didn't "fuck up the end game" by pulling out when the Soviets left, we supported the wrong people from the beginning and it was always going to backfire.

 

[napoleon IV]

Charlie Wilson also isn't exactly the most objective source, given that Operation Cyclone was his signature policy.