As the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter was what those familiar with the details of American politics call a typical one-term president. His term took place during a dramatic period in American history. The Vietnam War had ended in 1973, but two years later the regime in Hanoi occupied the southern part of the country, putting an end to the tortured peace treaty concluded with Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
This was commented on "Facebook" by Ognyan Minchev.
What remains is the "Vietnam Syndrome" - the deep public frustration and division of America as a result of the defeat. In 1973, the global energy crisis, caused by the OPEC cartel, broke out - largely in response to Washington's support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War with a large Arab coalition. In 1976 - when Jimmy Carter won the presidential election - the book of one of the leading liberals - technocrats of the 1960s, Daniel Bell, was published in America - "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism". The optimism of the technocratic guru Bell was abandoned and replaced by the pathos of the coming neoconservative revolution, which was destined to break out on a full scale in the early 1980s...
America is preparing for a dramatic change in its position as the leader of the free world. New global elites, born in the USA, but quickly acquiring the identity of a global corporate and financial establishment, are gaining strength. Politically, the leap into the global era was to be led by another American president - Ronald Reagan. But in the second half of the turbulent 1970s, a completely different type of president entered the White House. James Earl Carter, although a representative of the still different American South, turned out to be a typical representative of the great political tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, who built the liberal political alliance of the Democratic Party, which fundamentally transformed the philosophy and practice of state governance. America from the 1930s to the 1970s - despite the libertarian market tradition and culture - was a country governed according to the logic of the Keynesian redistribution model, which reduced social polarization and created a powerful middle class in American society. Jimmy Carter is the last president of this liberal public coalition of the Democratic Party, who must deal with the looming clouds of the economic crisis of the 1970s.
This crisis is not just a cyclical recession - it is a structural crisis of Keynesian state governance, which needs a protected national market in order to be able to maintain effective redistribution within the framework of the so-called "demand economy". Globalization requires something else - the destruction of the walls protecting the national market and the transition to a global market, unconstrained by the intervention of the national interest. It is this clash that gives rise to the crisis of a government locked in the logic of Keynesian state regulation. Dangerously high inflation, atypically combined with unemployment and stagnation of economic growth - the national interest can no longer be defended with the tools of the New Deal, which gave meaning to the heyday of America after the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter came to the White House in the midst of the crisis. His attempts to control it were unsuccessful. The assessment of a "weak president" that resulted from this failure was somewhat unfair. Carter was elected by the voters precisely as a representative of this liberal coalition of the Democratic Party, which had traditionally governed with the philosophy of the New Deal. In 1972, even Richard Nixon - one of the most conservative American presidents - declared: "Now we are all, of course, Keynesians..."
Internationally, Jimmy Carter's administration had two very significant achievements. The peace agreement between Egypt and Israel was concluded at Camp David. The structure of the Middle East conflict changed significantly - and for now irreversibly. In 1975, the agreements of the Conference on Security and Cooperation were signed in Helsinki, which opened the brief era of "diffusion" - detente - between East and West. Within the framework of the so-called "third basket" the Kremlin and its satellites agree to allow independent organizations to monitor human rights on their territory. For the communist leaders, of course, this commitment is purely formal - they do not intend to fulfill it to a greater extent than their commitment from December 1948, when Stalin signed the UN Charter on Human Rights. However, times are different.
Jimmy Carter - together with his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski - turned the issue of human rights in totalitarian communist societies into a key strategy for an ideological offensive against Bolshevik ideology and governance. This strategy ended the conventional "balance" in the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, in which communist ideology flirted with left-wing political movements in the West and with decolonized societies in the Third World, offering its services to the "leader of progressive forces". The spotlight on the brutal self-mutilation of human rights activists and organizations in the Eastern Bloc - with the Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Vladimir Bukovsky, with Charter '77 in Prague and with the Committee for the Protection of Workers in Poland - deprived the Soviet ideological monopoly of the last vestiges of its international legitimacy. The strategy of protecting human rights played a key role in the erosion of totalitarian communist regimes and in the realization - especially of the younger generations in the Eastern Bloc - of the complete illegitimacy of the ruling communist party and its ideology. Soviet-style totalitarianism began to rot rapidly and reduced itself to a simple repressive dictatorship under the pressure of movements such as the Polish "Solidarity", under the influence of the self-sacrifice of dissident activists, under the influence of the truth of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"...
As a person, Jimmy Carter was deeply convinced of the cause of human rights and spent decades of his long life trying to improve their observance in numerous international crises and conflicts. Carter was a Christian with a deeply conscious mission to help his fellow man in any way within the limits of his abilities and the resources at his disposal. According to many, he was too "soft" a man for the position of leader of the free world. It is true that as president Carter faced challenges that he could not fully master. The Kremlin used the Helsinki "detente" agreements as a platform for impunity for interventions in many places around the world - in Africa and Central America. The intervention in Afghanistan was the final act of abuse of good relations between the East and the West. With the invasion of Kabul, Moscow "shortened the distance" for possible intervention in the "Islamic revolution" in Iran and for mastering geopolitical positions in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf. Carter announced the end of "detente", but did not have the time and potential to implement a large-scale turn in Washington's policy against the Kremlin's growing aggression in international relations. A few months later, the operation to free American hostages in Tehran also failed.
Throughout his entire life, Jimmy Carter remains one of the few bright individuals in the conflicted and often gloomy world of politics. His impeccable personal and political morality, his Christian service to people all over the planet, and his personal example of human kindness and responsibility remain in the history of the modern world as an example of a life worth living. As president in a dynamic era of change, he did not achieve all of his goals. As a man with a global presence and a steadfastly pursued mission in the service of humanity and kindness, Carter remains an unsurpassed example to follow and deep respect. May God forgive him!