Jimmy Carter's enduring diplomatic legacy: ANALYSIS

A generous description of former President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy track record during his four tumultuous years in the White House would be one defined by peaks and valleys.

There were highlights. Many see Carter's role in brokering the Camp David Accords, a revolutionary set of treaties between Israel and Egypt that would forever change the diplomatic landscape of the Middle East, as the foreign policy apex of his presidency.

But there were also stinging failures, including the Iran hostage crisis -- a 444-day chapter of Carter's term during which 53 American diplomats and private citizens were held captive inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

However, historians and analysts say understanding Carter's true impact requires looking far beyond the relatively short time he spent as leader of the free world, and that the former president -- once rejected as a failure -- has wielded an outsize influence on international affairs that will reverberate for years to come.

'Fairness not force'

When Carter left the White House in 1981, it was under a cloud of failure. In the wake of his punishing defeat by Ronald Reagan, Carter told one of his biographers that he was hopelessly distraught and wanted nothing more than to lie low in his native Georgia.

That all changed, he said, when a cataclysmic event sent shockwaves through the Middle East: the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Carter had worked alongside Sadat to broker the Camp David Accords, and in the process, the world leaders forged a deep, personal bond.

While Carter was celebrated for his part in the negotiations, Sadat was lambasted by his own countrymen. Carter said he viewed the Egyptian leader's death at the hands of jihadists as Sadat paying the ultimate price for peace they had brokered in the wooded mountains of Maryland.

Carter later credited that sacrifice for pulling him from his despair and eventually leading him to found The Carter Presidential Center -- a multifaceted nonprofit aimed at promoting human rights, with missions as varied as election monitoring and eradicating parasitic diseases.

However, Carter's focus on easing suffering around the world was not a post-presidential pursuit so much as a return to form.

On the campaign trail in the mid-1970s, Carter had vowed to make advancing human rights a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy -- a significant shift for the time.

"Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere. Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights," he declared in his inaugural address.

That sentiment is what drove Carter in 1979 to conclude negotiations with Panama aimed at giving the Central American nation control of the Panama Canal, administered by the U.S since construction began in 1904 (and now something President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to reassert).

The State Department credits that development for enabling "the United States to defend itself from charges of imperialism made by Soviet-aligned states" and boosting cooperating between the U.S. and Panama.

Yet, despite Carter's intentions, he sometimes wavered, and the actions he took in pursuit of his self-described "fairness not force" doctrine were prone to backfire, according to Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Carter was a foreign policy neophyte, idealistic about efforts to achieve Middle East peace and driven by a Christian faith that informed his vocal but inconsistent focus on human rights," he said.

Takeyh points to Carter's decision to turn a blind eye towards human rights abuses committed by the Iranian shah's government -- an influential partner in the fight against Soviet influence -- as an example of that inconsistency.

Carter's critics say that blind spot also obscured the looming Iranian revolution and clouded his judgment of the newly installed regime, setting in motion a series of decisions that would foment the hostage crises and irreparably sour relations between Washington and Tehran.

After Carter was once again caught off-guard by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he "responded with increasingly hawkish actions," including "an aggressive national security strategy focused on the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East" -- foreshadowing the decades of war in the region to come, according to Takeyh.

A matter of timing

However, other analysts argue that Carter's open embrace of human rights was actually a subtle success -- but one that took years to come fully into focus.

Reagan, Carter's successor, is often credited with bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it, the end of the Cold War. But Daniel Fried, a former U.S ambassador to Poland and distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, argues that Carter's contributions are overlooked.

"Introducing human rights into U.S. bilateral relations meant that the default Cold War policy that a reliably anticommunist government could be embraced," Fried said, adding that it meant tolerating authoritarian rule was "no longer automatic."

"By elevating human rights in the mix of U.S.-Soviet and U.S.-Soviet bloc relations, Carter put the United States on offense in the Cold War and on the side of the people of the region," he added.

Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americans program at Chatham House, describes Carter's elevation of human rights as "visionary."

"It came at a time when the promotion of human rights was seen to be at odds with the more central priorities of a superpower during the Cold War," she said.

Vinjamuri says that approach continued to serve Carter in the four decades following his time in the White House as he pushed to advance peace and democracy around the world, orchestrating missions to Bosnia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Haiti.

No boundaries

Still Carter's willingness to put people and personal relationships at the heart of foreign diplomacy can be seen as either a bug or a feature of his approach.

Both during and after his presidency, Carter's willingness to meet face-to-face with communist leaders and deepen ties with the nations they led repeatedly sparked controversy.

In 1979, Carter severed formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan -- choosing to recognize Beijing as the sole legal government of China, effectively creating Washington's "One China policy."

Congress swiftly retaliated by passing the Taiwan Relations Act, requiring the U.S. to provide defensive arms to Taiwan -- legislation that Carter signed. The two steps, seemingly at odds, set the tone for the complicated and deeply consequential relationship between the powers that exists to this very day.

More than two decades later, Carter became the first president in or out of office to visit Cuba since the country's revolution in 1959. While some heralded the 2002 trip as a groundbreaking step to promote democracy that cemented Carter's status as an accomplished statesman, others slammed the former president -- accusing him of legitimizing Cuba's President Fidel Castro and his regime.

But Carter's willingness to cross boundaries in pursuit of what he saw as global good did not end with world leaders.

The same year Carter traveled to Cuba, he also journeyed to Africa -- visiting several countries where the AIDS/HIV epidemic was still ravaging populations and deeply stigmatizing.

There, alongside former South African President Nelson Mandela, Carter cradled babies infected with the virus, lovingly holding the infants as cameras snapped pictures.

Dr. Helene Gayle, the president of Spelmen College, who accompanied Mandela and Carter on the trip, says it's a scene she will never forget.

"They wanted to show everyone that these babies were no harm to anyone, including world leaders," she said.