Russia’s invasion of Crimea has led many pundits to compare President Barack Obama’s foreign policies with those of President Jimmy Carter. The similarities are difficult to ignore, up to a point.
Both men were elected to the presidency by a war-weary nation seeking to improve relations with its enemies and place the country’s foreign policy on a higher moral plain. Carter looked to reinvigorate Washington’s relations with Moscow, going so far as to caution the American people against having an “inordinate fear” of Communists. Thirty years later Obama sent his secretary of state to deliver a “reset button” to his Russian counterpart in the hope of giving the two countries’ relationship a new and more cooperative beginning.
Carter avowed that his administration would set higher moral standards in its relations with other states. Autocrats could no longer count on Washington’s unconditional support, as the Shah of Iran, a long-standing U.S. partner, discovered when confronted with a revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Likewise, Obama proclaimed a new dawn between the United States and the Middle East and, like Carter, did not intervene while a U.S. ally, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, was toppled, leading to the rise of the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. And like Carter following the rise of Khomeini, Obama signaled to Tehran’s mullahs that he was interested in seeking opportunities for cooperation with the Islamic regime.
Yet the hopes of both presidents proved unfounded.
In response to Carter’s extended hand, the Soviets employed proxies in Africa and Central America to expand their spheres of influence. In 1979, the rise of Khomeini in Iran triggered a wave of radical Islamism. U.S. embassies in Pakistan and Iran were sacked, with the U.S. staff in Tehran seized as hostages. That December, Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan.
Similarly, Obama has found the Arab Spring to be the herald of greater regional instability, not the dawn of popular government. The violent and protracted Syrian revolution finds Washington on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt proved less interested in promoting democracy than enforcing its own brand of Sunni radicalism. Fortunately, they were turned out by the Egyptian military before having a chance to establish their own brand of anti-American authoritarianism. And now Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has moved his troops into Crimea, violating Ukraine’s sovereignty in an act of open aggression.
The parallels between the paths of the two presidents could end here.
What is often forgotten is that only a month after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter called for increases in defense spending of 4.6 percent per year, every year over five years. In a sense this was a modest down payment on the Reagan defense buildup that followed.