Obama Invokes the Carter Doctrine on Foreign Policy

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President Obama has promised to “rebuild America’s image abroad” by way of aggressive diplomacy. The idea being that the world hates America because, under former President George W. Bush, the US became an international bully. But this theme is not new. It was echoed some 35 years earlier by a US President with the worst foreign policy record imaginable, President Jimmy Carter.

Arthur Herman of Commentary Magazine, takes up this argument brilliantly in an article entitled, “The Return of Carterism?” Herman relates, in pertinent part:

“…..Carter proclaimed, governments that violated their own citizens’ human rights would no longer receive American support but would instead incur our opposition. A foreign policy so constructed would, theoretically, encourage the growth of democracy in third-world countries and reduce the appeal of more radical or revolutionary ideologies.

In the event, the opposite happened. As Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out at the time, instead of paving the way to democracy, the withdrawal of support from petty dictators in Latin America paved the way for a surrender of American interests—at the expense of our hopes for democratization.1 The only countries on which the U.S. could bring significant pressure to bear were those ruled by authoritarians who restricted certain freedoms while leaving others intact; by contrast, we enjoyed little or no leverage at all with totalitarian regimes that systematically destroyed all
freedoms and treated us as their ideological enemy.

Thus the fallacy turned out to be not the old cold-war mentality but the new Carter human-rights policy. When we ceased supporting our bad allies, they were replaced by far worse antagonists.”