The President Who Couldn’t Stop: Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy Legacy Extends Beyond the White House

Jimmy Carter, the 100-year-old former president who lived long enough to see Donald Trump re-elected but died just before the start of the new year, has a foreign policy legacy defined not only by his four years in The White House.

During his presidency, the former Georgia governor boasted of helping to forge peace between Israel and Egypt and restoring relations with China. But when he suffered one of the nation’s most decisive defeats by President Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter still had ambitions he wasn’t ready to stop pursuing.

Carter is largely hailed for the altruistic nature of his post-presidency, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity well into the 90s. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his peace negotiations, but some accused the former president of meddling in international affairs without any official title.

Here’s a look at Carter’s entrance onto the world stage, both as president and beyond:

Unauthorized peace agreement in North Korea

In 1994, Bill Clinton was in office in the middle of a battle with North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The US floated the idea of ​​sanctions – and even considered a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear facilities to destroy their capabilities.

Carter had received invitations from North Korea to visit, and was eager to try to defuse the situation and work out an agreement to unite North and South. As Clinton weighed her options, Carter called. He had negotiated the framework for a peace agreement without permission.

Carter had flown to North Korea with a CNN crew and phased out the deal. He called Clinton to warn him he was about to go on CNN to announce the deal, which enraged the Clinton White House, according to Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley’s book, “The Unfinished Presidency.”

Carter also accepted a dinner invitation from Kim Il-Sung in which he said the United States had stopped pursuing sanctions at the United Nations, which was untrue. Backed into a corner, Clinton had to accept the peace deal and stop pursuing sanctions.

Carter’s discussions with leader Kim Il-Sung may have averted the conflict with North Korea in the 1990s. The nation, of course, continued to pursue nuclear weapons and acquired them in 2006.

Carter asks Arab states to abandon US in Bush’s Gulf War

In the Middle East, Carter declared that he could have resolved the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in another term, a prospect that has still not been achieved by any president.

“If I had been elected for another term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation that I had in the region, we could have gone to a final settlement,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

Throughout the 1990s, Carter befriended Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and coached him on how to appear more moderate to the West, although Arafat continued to lead attacks on Israel and led the second intifada in 2000 .

JIMMY CARTER, PIONEER OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

When President George HW Bush decided to launch the Persian Gulf War after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Carter strongly opposed the idea. Five days before Bush’s deadline for Hussein’s withdrawal, Carter wrote to the leaders of nations on the UN Security Council and the main Arab states – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria – imploring them to abandon the US and its war effort.

“I urge you to publicly call for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forego the approval of the White House, but you will find the French, the Soviets and others fully supportive Most Americans will also welcome such a move.”

The move prompted former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to accuse Carter of violating the Logan Act, which says private citizens cannot negotiate with foreign governments.

Carter meets with Hamas and angers the Bush administration

In 2008, President George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, publicly tore into Carter for meeting with Hamas, a designated terrorist group, after the administration had specifically told him not to.

Rice told reporters that Carter’s meeting could confuse the message that the United States would not cooperate with Hamas.

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion,” Rice said. “The United States does not want to deal with Hamas, and we had certainly told President Carter that we did not think that meeting with Hamas would help” advance a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

JIMMY CARTER, 39TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, DIES AT 100

Carter, a strong advocate for the Palestinians after his presidency, argued that Israel’s policies amounted to an apartheid worse than South Africa’s.

Egypt-Israel peace treaty

By 1978, the breakthrough opportunity for Egypt and Israel to normalize relations had stalled. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt suggested ending contact with the Israelis.

In September of that year, Carter brought Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David, where Carter spent more than a week brokering negotiations for an agreement between the two sides. A framework of a treaty known as the Camp David Accords emerged from that meeting, and six months later Egypt became the first Arab state to establish relations with Israel.

The agreement included the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and a “path” for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 following Arab fury over the peace accord.

Normalization of US-China relations

In 1978, after months of secret negotiations, Carter established formal US relations with China, breaking decades of hostility between the two nations. That meant canceling a defense treaty with Taiwan, where Carter remains a controversial figure.

It also prompted Congress to pass the Taiwan Relations Act to continue supplying arms to Taiwan and “maintain the capability to resist” any attempt to take it over.

1979 Iranian hostage crisis

In 1979, the shah of the Iranian regime, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and Carter had a strategic relationship in which Carter was silent on his dubious human rights record, even as the shah’s grip on power was slipping.

Protests had erupted in Iran over the Shah’s repressive policies, but Carter continued to support him and feared the alternative: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Pahlavi fled into exile in January 1979, and Carter initially resisted requests to grant him asylum in the United States before allowing him to seek cancer treatment in New York City in October of that year. And on November 4, Iranian students angry at the decision stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 hostages.

The hostage crisis spanned the rest of Carter’s tenure and for many defined his legacy on the world stage. With no decision, Carter moved in April 1980 for a military bailout.

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The mission ended in tragic failure: several helicopters were grounded outside Tehran in a sandstorm, and eight special forces were killed when their helicopter crashed. Iran then captured American equipment and intelligence.

The hostages were not released until January 20, 1981 – minutes after President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

Signs the Panama Canal back to Panama

President-elect Trump has brought Carter’s Panama Canal treaties back into the spotlight, reflecting on Tuesday that offering control of the canal to Panama lost Carter the 1980 election.

Despite stiff opposition from the right, Carter believed that returning the canal would improve American relations in Latin America and ensure peace between American shipping lanes, as he feared that opposition to American control could lead to violence on the waterway.

“It is obvious that we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” Carter wrote in a diary. But he had also received intelligence that it could take up to 100,000 soldiers to defend the canal in the event of a rebellion.

In recent days, Trump has proposed taking back the canal — claiming the U.S. is paying too much to use it and that it is controlled by China.

“Giving the Panama Canal to Panama was a big reason why Jimmy Carter lost the election, even more so than the hostages,” Trump said.