Jimmy Carter’s elevation of human rights in U.S. foreign policy offers many urgent lessons for today. Whatever challenges he faced consistently applying the principles he championed as the 39th president, he made a radical break with decades of foreign policy tradition, changed the world’s understanding of America’s aspirations, showed deep empathy for individuals who had suffered human rights abuse and in so doing, made a lasting impact on both the United States and the world.
Much of the celebration of Mr. Carter’s legacy has centered on his groundbreaking postpresidential work. Understandably so: Beyond his tireless volunteering, working to build affordable homes with Habitat for Humanity well into his 90s, the Carter Center — his passion for the past 42 years — has worked with U.S.A.I.D. and others to nearly eliminate river blindness in the Western Hemisphere and to decrease the number of reported Guinea worm cases from more than three million per year in the mid-1980s to just 14 in 2023. Mr. Carter also changed the global understanding of what a free and fair election requires by pioneering the dispatch of diverse teams of impartial observers, which have monitored 125 elections in 40 countries. And after leaving office in 1981, he lent his mediation services to successive administrations, defusing tensions in such places as Guyana, Liberia and Sudan.
As president, his foreign policy legacy was also consequential. It includes the negotiation of the Camp David Accords, which brought about an enduring peace between Israel and Egypt, and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China (after the rapprochement begun under President Richard Nixon). Mr. Carter also negotiated the Panama Canal treaties and pushed them through the Senate, thereby removing a source of anti-American feeling in Latin America and showing that the United States, in Mr. Carter’s words, would “deal fairly and honorably” with smaller nations.
The former president’s regard for human rights was an outgrowth of his Christian faith — a faith so animating that he continued to teach Sunday school while president. He often quoted biblical passages in explaining why America had a responsibility to stand up for those being persecuted elsewhere. He quoted Jesus from Matthew 25:40: “Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”
Mr. Carter’s embrace of international human rights also grew out of his commitment to civil rights at home. As he once described his childhood in Plains, Ga.: “I saw at first hand the effects of a system of deprivation of rights. I saw the courage of those who resisted that system. And finally, I saw the cleansing energies that were released when my own region of this country walked out of darkness.” He recognized that just as government enforcement was needed in order for the rights of Black Americans to be realized at home, so too government action would be needed if human rights conditions were to improve abroad.
His human rights message had broad appeal in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, with Americans and many in Congress clamoring for ethics and decency from their leaders. Nonetheless, Mr. Carter made a far more marked departure than expected when he proclaimed in his 1977 Inaugural Address, “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere,” and when he later defined human rights as “the soul of our foreign policy.”
Mr. Carter didn’t just change the way U.S. officials talked; he changed the way they worked, taking steps no American president had taken. When he assumed office, U.S.A.I.D. had nearly twice as many staff members in Washington as in the field — an imbalance his administration corrected, in addition to significantly expanding the agency’s presence in sub-Saharan Africa. He named an outspoken civil rights activist as the first assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the State Department and significantly increased the number of staff members dedicated solely to human rights issues, which numbered only two when Mr. Carter took office but grew to more than a dozen by the next year. American embassies around the world appointed human rights officers explicitly tasked to look into the conditions around them, something that U.S. diplomats had rarely been asked to report on before. The same embassies opened their doors to government critics and the victims of human rights abuses.
He issued Presidential Directive 30, which stipulated that “countries with a good or substantially improving record of human rights observance will be given special consideration in the allocation of U.S. foreign assistance, just as countries with a poor or deteriorating record will receive less favorable consideration.” Owing to reviews of American assistance — along with pressure and legislation from Congress — the United States halted military aid to Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay during the Carter years and reduced assistance to Ethiopia, Guinea, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Tunisia. The Carter administration also opposed dozens of efforts to grant loans from international financial institutions to abusive regimes, promising relief only in exchange for concrete improvements.
Mr. Carter brought a signature focus to the fate of individuals. His administration’s pressure was seen to have played an important role in persuading the Indonesian government to release 30,000 political prisoners. In South Korea, Mr. Carter and members of his administration undertook extensive diplomacy to save the life of Kim Dae-jung, one of the country’s most prominent political dissidents and pro-democracy voices. The American ambassador in Seoul later wrote that “in my foreign service career, I can recall few other examples of such a concentrated effort by the U.S. government on behalf of a single individual.” Mr. Kim was eventually elected president and was a strong U.S. ally.
Emilio Mignone, who became Argentina’s best-known human rights activist after his daughter was disappeared by the government, credited Mr. Carter’s pressure for saving thousands of lives in his country. When the journalist Jacobo Timerman was released after 30 months of imprisonment in Argentina, subjected to severe torture by the military junta, he thanked Mr. Carter for helping to secure his release. When the two men met in 1984, Mr. Timerman asked Mr. Carter, “How do you feel looking at my face, knowing that you saved my life?” Mr. Timerman later recalled that Mr. Carter simply blushed and looked down.
Mr. Carter was the first U.S. president to publicly denounce apartheid in South Africa and the first to make a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa. His sustained personal engagement and diplomacy were later deemed among the most critical outside influences in Zimbabwe’s peaceful transition to majority rule in 1980. And he was the first president to assert clear American support for a “Palestinian homeland.”
During Mr. Carter’s four years in office, his administration confronted an escalating series of refugee crises, first as it sought to address the surge of families fleeing repression and atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and then as it reckoned with a surprise decision by President Fidel Castro of Cuba to temporarily allow Cubans to flee to the United States. Despite the clear political perils, Mr. Carter insisted that providing “an open heart and open arms to refugees” was central to America’s identity as a nation. He ordered the U.S. Navy to conduct rescue missions for people lost at sea, created the Office of the U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs at the State Department, pushed Congress to rewrite the entire legal framework for refugee admissions and increased the number of refugees admitted into the country during each year of his presidency. In 1980, after Mr. Carter signed the landmark Refugee Act into law, his administration resettled over 207,000 refugees in the United States — the most recorded in a single year in the country’s history.
Mr. Carter’s conception of human rights was inclusive. He emphasized economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights, making clear that even if economic development occurred at different paces in different places, corrupt governments and those indifferent to the plight of the poor violated the right to “the basic human requirements of food, shelter, health and education.”
He was the first American president to elevate environmental conservation to a global concern, helping prevent deforestation and establish protected lands in countries such as Nepal and Costa Rica. Mr. Carter even signed the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which remains unratified more than four decades later).
This emphasis on inclusivity — as well as on the legitimacy of the U.S. message — led Mr. Carter to argue that the United States should be held to the same international standards it was applying to others. He did not shy away from discussing the ways in which his own country was falling short, and he was not defensive about “our deficiencies.” Rather, he welcomed constructive engagement from outsiders, arguing, “We have nothing to conceal” and, for example, inviting the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to undertake investigations in the United States.
Some said Mr. Carter was naïve to introduce human rights policy to the cold, cruel world of geopolitics, especially at the height of the Cold War, when the United States coveted strategic allies. Others criticized his administration’s inadequate application of human rights standards in countries where the United States had major security interests, faulting him for being too passive in the face of South Korean and Iranian repression and for easing human rights pressure on the Soviet Union during arms control talks. They also slammed his resistance to even more aggressive congressional efforts to mandate U.S. aid cutoffs, which Mr. Carter argued would tie his hands and deprive him of the ability to bargain with abusive regimes to secure reforms.
Mr. Carter made no apology for rejecting what his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, called “mechanistic formulas” and for recognizing that different aims sometimes competed for precedence; Mr. Vance pointed out that “the outbreak of armed conflict or terrorism could in itself pose a serious threat to human rights.” Speaking at the University of Notre Dame in May 1977, Mr. Carter argued, “We live in a world that is imperfect, and which will always be imperfect, a world that is complex and confused. … I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily.”
He became president after public trust in government had plunged. More than 70 percent of Americans believed the Vietnam War was not just a mistake but was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” He viewed his embrace of human rights as a means of restoring faith in America.
As we mourn the loss of Jimmy Carter, we should remember that in doing something so radical for his time — elevating attention to the plight and dignity of individuals in U.S. foreign policy and then living those values until his final days — he changed our world for good.
The post Samantha Power: The Conscience of Jimmy Carter appeared first on New York Times.
