Carter’s Lost Opportunity

Abstract

Journalists who had followed James Earl (Jimmy) Carter’s rise from Georgia politics to the White House in 1977 assumed that he would concentrate on the immediate issues of inflation and unemployment. They discovered soon enough, however, that the new president had assembled a full spectrum of foreign policy objectives designed to achieve success where presumably his predecessors had failed. To Carter, the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford policies had divided the country and diminished the presidency by employing tactics abroad divorced from the nation’s values. That approached had failed, demonstrated most graphically by the intellectual and moral poverty of the long U.S. engagement in Vietnam. The nation’s perennial anticommunism had caused it to lose sight of the American mission. Convinced that previous administrations had exaggerated the Communist threat, he promised more relaxed, flexible, and rewarding relations with the U.S.S.R., anchored to the pursuit of U.S.-Soviet cooperation on a wide range of issues, including a SALT II treaty on arms control. Asian peace and security, believed Carter, required a more constructive Sino-American relationship.