The 39th U.S. president whose administration marked both the peak and the end of détente
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter declared in his January 1980 State of the Union: 'An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.'
A Georgia peanut farmer and Baptist, Carter rose from Navy nuclear submarine officer to become a 'New South' governor who pledged to end racial discrimination. Elected president in 1976 as a Washington outsider, he brokered the Camp David Accords, returned the Panama Canal, and normalized diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. In June 1979 he brought détente to its peak by signing SALT II with Brezhnev in Vienna, only to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that December, proclaiming the Carter Doctrine and closing the era of détente. After leaving office he founded the Carter Center, dedicating his post-presidency to human rights, public health, and conflict mediation, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1963–1967Georgia State Senator
- 1971–197576th Governor of Georgia
- 1977–198139th President of the United States
- 1982Founded the Carter Center
- 2002Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Related historical events
- 1969–1979Détente and the SALT NegotiationsU.S. president who signed SALT IISigned SALT II with Brezhnev in Vienna in 1979, then withdrew it from Senate consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
- 1978–1979The Sino-Vietnamese WarUS presidentReserved judgment on Deng’s plan, which China took as tacit approval.
Institutionalizing Human Rights Diplomacy (1977-1981)
Carter campaigned in 1976 promising to restore a moral foundation to U.S. foreign policy. In his inaugural address of January 20, 1977, he declared that "because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere," making human rights a cornerstone of diplomacy. Within weeks he personally explained his human rights policy to the Soviet ambassador, wrote to the Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov expressing support for the release of political prisoners, and linked cuts in aid to Argentina, Ethiopia, and Uruguay to human rights violations. He raised the issue again in his March 1977 address to the United Nations General Assembly.
The commitment was hardened into institutions. In April 1977 Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, speaking at the University of Georgia Law School, set out three categories of rights - freedom from government violation of personal integrity, fulfillment of vital needs such as food, shelter, and education, and freedom of thought, movement, and association - and stressed flexibility case by case. In May, Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC 28 directed a review of human rights policy, and its results took shape in Presidential Directive 30 of February 1978, which tied economic and military assistance to recipients' human rights records. The State Department created a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs; the civil rights activist Patricia Derian became its first Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and producing and publishing the annual human rights country reports became a core task of the bureau.
Applying the policy to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collided with detente. Invoking the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, Washington put the cases of monitoring groups such as the Moscow Helsinki Group and of individual dissidents onto the diplomatic agenda, pressing them at the Belgrade follow-up conference of 1977-1978. Moscow denounced this as interference in its internal affairs, and repression against dissidents nonetheless became widely known internationally. The principle was not applied consistently, however, to allied and anti-communist authoritarian regimes, drawing criticism of selectivity; after 1979 the Iran hostage crisis and Afghanistan shifted the policy's center of gravity toward security.