As the tributes roll in before
America bids farewell to Jimmy Carter, current global turbulence
provides fresh reminders that the decisions the late 39th president made
in office continue to impact the world four decades later and present
both challenges and opportunities for the man about to assume the White
House for a second term.
Many of the issues confronting President-elect Donald Trump – Iran,
the Panama Canal, the Education Department and appeasement diplomacy –
have their roots in the Carter presidency, a reality that can’t be
erased by the significant humanitarian achievements the former president
aggregated after he left office or the widely recognized kindness of
the God-fearing, Navy-serving peanut farmer who lived to be 100.
“I don't think there's anyone that would say a bad thing about him, personally,” said Nicholas Giordano, a political science professor at Suffolk Community College and a popular podcaster. “He was genuinely a good and decent human being.
“But it shows you that sometimes being good and decent isn't necessarily equating to success as president,” he added.
Here are a few of the good-guy-bad-policy debates that arose in
Carter’s final days on earth as Trump prepares to return to the White
House next month.
Panama Canal
The Panama Canal was an engineering marvel that the United States
built and paid for in 1914 and that Carter gifted away in a 1977 treaty.
That treaty gave Panama full control of the canal as of 1999 after decades of U.S. operation, but it also codified it would remain free and neutral to shipping traffic.
Carter declared at the time
the transaction removed “the last remnant of alleged American
colonialism.” Critics like Ronald Reagan, however, warned the treaty
gave away America’s hard-earned construction genius and would one day
place the western world in a security lurch over one of the most
important marine passageways in the world.
"The canal is ours, we bought and we paid for it and we should keep
it," the late Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond said at the time.
China and Panama
Those security concerns are coming into clearer focus today
as communist China’s companies have won bids in the last decade for
several major infrastructure projects like power plants, a bridge and
canal locks near the site.
To show his newfound influence in Panama, President Xi also made a
state visit to Panama in 2018 after the Latin American country joined
Beijing’s "Belt and Road" initiative.
Today, Panamanian exports to China dwarf those to the United States
and imports from Beijing have caught up to those from America, a tilt in
economic allegiance that is nearly as concerning to members of Congress
as the growth of the Chinese presence around the famed canal.
“A visitor to the Panama Canal might think they were in China. Ports
at both ends of the Canal are managed by companies from the People's
Republic of China (PRC), while Huawei dominates the country's telecoms
system,” then-Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., wrote in a Newsweek Op/Ed a year ago as part of his leadership of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
“Panama illustrates the relentless advance of CCP influence across
the Western Hemisphere,” he added. “…. The real prize is control—not
only control of strategic points such as the Panama Canal and ports but
of natural resources, telecommunications, and ultimately governments.”
Trump began raising such concerns in 2019 and he catapulted the issue
to the front of public consciousness over the Christmas holiday with a
bold declaration.
If Panama doesn’t begin lowering shipping rates for passage through
the canal, "we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in
full, quickly and without question,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Liberals and Panamanians scoffed at such a notion. But Trump’s
declaration seized public fascination, prompting a debate unlike
anything since Carter first touched off a firestorm with the treaty.
Even left-leaning National Public Radio had to admit “it feels like 1976 all over again.”
Wherever Trump’s quest on the canal ends, the debate was just one
reminder in Carter’s final days that his decisions five decades ago
continue to raise concern today.
The Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis
It is ironic that Carter’s greatest foreign success and his worst failure both occurred in the turbulent Middle East.
The 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and
Egypt and landed Carter a Nobel Prize reshaped the region’s dynamic, and
eventually led to future successes like Trump’s Abraham Accords in 2020
that widened the partnerships between Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors.
But the progress toward peace afforded by the accords was countered
by the Carter administration’s hesitant response to an Iranian crisis in
1978-79. That crisis began with signs that the ruling monarch, Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was in danger of being ousted by religious Shia
Islamist zealots and ended with the fall of the country to an anti-U.S.
regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the capture of 444 American
hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran,
The hostage crisis felled Carter’s presidency and paved the way for
Reagan’s 1980 victory. But it also exposed Carter for his hesitancy and
indecision on the world stage as well as a propensity to try to win over
adversaries through appeasement, something that Democrat successors
Barack Obama and Joe Biden also adapted.
Documents released years
later show Carter was explicitly warned in fall 1978 by his ambassador
to Iran, William Sullivan, that the Shah was in danger of falling and
that a failure of the United States to find a moderate replacement might
lead to an extremist, anti-American regime.
“The authority of the Shah has considerably shrunk,” Sullivan wrote
in a November 9, 1978, cable. “His support among the general public has
become almost invisible these days.”
Iran falls to theocracy
“Our current approach of trusting that the Shah together with the
military will be able to face down the Khomeini threat is obviously the
only safe course to pursue at this juncture,” the ambassador wrote.
“However if it should fail and if the Shah should abdicate we need to
think the unthinkable at this time in order to give our thoughts some
precision should the unthinkable contingency arise.”
You can read that full cable here.
Carter didn’t aggressively seek to replace the Shah, and Iran fell to
the theocracy of Khomeini-led mullahs, leaving America and Western
allies subject to decades of terrorist attacks ranging from Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s to the current horrors of Hamas’
Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel or the Houthi attacks on American
ships in the Red Sea this year.
“You have to deal with a lot of vicious people on the international
world stage, and that indecisiveness was what crippled his
administration, particularly when it came to the Iranian hostage
crisis,” Giordano told Just the News on Monday.
Carter was viewed as similarly passive when Soviet troops invaded
Afghanistan, touching off a mujahadeen war that gave rise to Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda and the eventual Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
U.S. Education Department
Carter’s decision to create the Department of Education as a new
Cabinet-level agency in 1979 – with the help of a Democrat-run Congress –
came despite a belief among conservatives and libertarians that it
violated the Constitution.
The Constitution never explicitly authorized the federal government to oversee education, and the 10th Amendment declared that “the
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.”
For four decades, conservatives starting with Reagan expressed
hope they could one day rescind the department. But for most of that
time it was a pipe dream. But in 2024, Trump declared he would eliminate
the agency that Carter created from whole cloth and many members of
Congress have rallied behind the notion, giving fresh momentum to the
movement.
Part of the impetus came from the return-on-investment analysis.
Since its inception, the Education Department has spent hundreds of
billions of taxpayer dollars and yet student performance has mostly
stagnated.
Reading scores in 2023 were the same as they were in the 1970s, and math scores were only slightly higher, according to the government’s own data.
And the agency proved unable to stop a precipitous slide in student
performance brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdown.
The Biden department’s advocacy for far-left ideologies like DEI and
allowing transgender men in women’s sports also disillusioned many
Americans, adding fresh public support for a smaller, if not eliminated
agency.
While the statistics show student performance has stagnated, many feel the overall state of education has declined.
“All of these things have gotten worse since we created a Federal
Department of Education,” Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction
Ryan Walters told Just the News on Monday.
“We've allowed the left to win this argument for too long: give more
power to bureaucrats, give more power to government, and our kids will
magically get smarter. Well, that's just not true,” he added. “As a
matter of fact, the opposite is true. The more that you give power to
the government, the less power families have.”
History's Final Verdict
When the nation mourns Carter at his Jan. 9 State Funeral in
Washington, D.C., he will accurately be remembered for his kindness, his
faith, his service to country and the humanitarian achievements of his
years out of office.
But his successor as the 47th president will also be face global and
national challenges that were also of Carter’s making, and history will
ultimately write the final chapter on how those turned out.
“Look, he was a statesman,” Walters said of Carter. “His impact,
especially after coming out of the White House, was tremendous. You
know, a guy that really gave a tremendous amount from him and his family
to his fellow man. But listen, I. I think when you study history, we've
got to be up front with our kids.
“It doesn't matter if you're Republican, Democrat, what your
background is. We've got to go in and say, here's what happened while
this person was president. Here were their policies. Here was the
impact,” he added.
