After President
Ford came President Carter, more as an accidental beneficiary of Mr. Ford’s trouble with the
American Jewish Lobby than in his own right. As I said before, Mr. Carter was a
good and well-meaning man, but he was frankly not very competent as a President
of the United States. A virtual unknown among the American public, he was
fiercely promoted in the American press for the obvious anti-Ford reason
mentioned above. Incidentally, I have no doubt that, had Ronald Reagan managed
to upset Ford in the 1976 Republican Primary, the world would not have heard of
Jimmy Carter beyond his regional recognition as a one-term Governor of Georgia.
Just
as easily as he was boosted into the White House, President Carter’s first day in office
became the first day of his downfall. Beset with too many domestic problems,
the terrible Energy Crisis, accentuated
by an economic recession and a seemingly unstoppable currency inflation, plus
several other national scandals, such as the Love Canal disaster in Upstate New York, all overwhelming his
domestic agenda and leaving no room for national optimism, his foreign policy
could hardly provide a counterbalance. In Soviet-American relations, the 1979
signing of the SALT II Treaty in Vienna (not in Washington or Moscow, not even
in Vladivostok!) by Carter and Brezhnev was never seen as a plus in the United
States, and was never ratified (until in 1986 it was cancelled by Ronald Reagan). Otherwise, the superpower relationship
virtually hit the rock bottom under President Carter, with the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan and the subsequent American boycott of the Olympic games held in
Moscow in 1980. The fact that one of the most rabidly anti-Russian scholars of
the time, the Pole Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski had been chosen as President Carter’s
National Security Advisor, did not help at all. An American President should
never have picked a subjectively biased man with a chip on his shoulder for
this very important job, where solid objectivity in the pursuit of an unadulterated
American interest was of the essence.
The
signing of the 1979 Camp David Accords between the desperately seeking Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s PM Menachem Begin did not give Mr. Carter a
probably hoped-for boost, as too many great foreign policy disasters were
saddling him with a virtually unmanageable load. Yielding the Panama Canal to
Panama back in 1977 had not been at all popular among the American people. President Carter’s random policy in Iran from 1977 through 1979, starting with his
embrace of the Shah, and followed by his abandonment of the very same Shah in
the course of the Iranian Revolution was a serious mistake not only with regard
to its grotesque inconsistency, but also in its awful outcome: the taking of
American hostages in Tehran, plus the subsequent negative longterm relationship
between the United States and Iran. Apparently, Dr. Brzezinski had better
things to do, with his pathological hatred for the Russian occupiers of his
native Poland, than to pay attention to anything else…
As
a last nuance I would like to mention US-Chinese relations under President
Carter. I remember my own political-linguistic analysis of Mr. Carter’s speeches on
the question of China. His key phrase, in my view, was: “The China Card is not a term used by my Administration.” As I pointed
out in my analysis, it was exactly President Carter’s China policy to use this
Nixon trophy as a trump card against the USSR. As I put it then, “the China Card exists, and it is being
played, but the only country really playing it is China.”
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