Ordinarily you don’t want to recommend Jimmy Carter as a role model for how to shape America’s approach to the world. But critics already routinely compare President Obama’s serial foreign-policy fumbles to Carter’s in the late ’70s, most recently over his supine response to Russians’ invasion of Ukraine.
The question is whether Obama can mount as definitive a turnaround as Carter did. President Carter, you see, is proof that a liberal Democratic president can reverse his own failed foreign policy, abandon its flawed assumptions — and get America back on track.
The parallels between Obama and the early Carter are plain. Like Obama, Carter came into office convinced the United States and its “arrogance of power” was the problem in the world, not the solution.
Like Obama, Carter believed that an America that reduced its military, cut back on its commitments abroad and abandoned what Carter called our Cold War “inordinate fear of Communism” would make new friends and heal past wounds.
So Carter signed away the Panama Canal to Panama in 1977. He pulled the plug on unsavory allies like the Somozas in Nicaragua and the shah in Iran — just as Obama would do with Mubarak in Egypt.
And just as Obama tried to “reset” relations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Carter unleashed a furious charm offensive on the Soviet Union, even embracing and kissing Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in public, and pushed the Senate to ratify a landmark nuke treaty, SALT II.
Instead of seeing American retreat under Carter as restraint, however, friends and foes alike saw it as weakness; instead of making new friends, his policy only empowered the world’s thugs.
One was the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose student followers took the US embassy in Tehran hostage on Nov. 4, 1979. Another were the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan the day after Christmas the same year.
Carter realized he’d been wrong: The world really is a dangerous place, especially when America decides to sit on the sidelines.
His response took three dramatic steps that set the stage for an American comeback in the 1980s — so much so that Reaganites would try to claim credit for them.
The first was pledging that US defense spending would rise by 4.6 percent per year, every year for five years, starting in 1980. This shocked and infuriated his fellow Democrats — and greased the wheels for President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup. (In the event, Reagan wound up increasing defense outlays less than Carter had planned.)
The second step came in the 1980 State of the Union Address, with announcement of the Carter Doctrine: The United States would use military force if necessary to defend our interests in the Persian Gulf.
To back this up, the president authorized the creation of the first Rapid Deployment Force — the ancestor of US Central Command or CENTCOM, the wheelhouse from which the United States would direct Desert Storm in 1991 and the fall of Saddam Hussein a decade later, and which keeps the Straits of Hormuz, vital to global energy markets, safe and open today.
The last step was authorizing the first covert military aid to Afghan guerrillas fighting their Soviet occupiers. That marked the start of the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan — a major landmark in the ultimate undoing of the Soviet Union.
Of course, no guerrillas in Ukraine are waiting for Obama to have his Carter moment. But there is a Ukrainian army, and one step Obama could take is to offer US military advisors and an arms package for a besieged Ukraine. Another Carter-like move would be for Obama to repudiate his most recent unilateral-disarmament defense budget, and work with Congress to prevent any more defense cuts under sequestration.
Still another would be to abrogate the New START nuke treaty signed with Putin, just as Carter put the brakes on SALT II with the Soviets after the invasion of Afghanistan.
Some would call that provocative. But it’s Putin who’s crossed that line, just as the Soviets did in 1979.
It’s time for a Democratic president to prove once again he can learn from experience, and reverse American retreat — even set the stage for freedom’s victory.
Arthur Herman is the author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.”