Carter's human rights vision offers the 'promise' of a new way of U.S. foreign policy, says historian

Record ID: 1893225

  • Title: Carter's human rights vision offers the 'promise' of a new way of U.S. foreign policy, says historian
  • Date: 30th December 2024
  • Summary: KILDARE, IRELAND (DECEMBER 30, 2024) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, RUTH LAWLOR, SAYING: "Carter’s administration saw the beginning of the unraveling of U.S. hegemony that has opened a period of, a vacuum period of conflict and geopolitical chaos. In, in, although in previous times, many historians saw him as a man who was out of time, in between two different geopolitical orders, I think now we can see him actually as standing at the beginning, at the precipice of the world that we’ve inhabited the past number of years since his administration. In that sense, he’s an initiator of many of the trends that we see in the world around us today rather than someone who was out of place.” WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, RUTH LAWLOR, SAYING: “Jimmy Carter is a rather contradictory character whose foreign policy vision was somewhat incoherent because he was both a Cold War president presiding over a vast global military infrastructure as well as the first in a line of post-Vietnam War neoliberal presidents in whose decisions we can see many signs of the world that we live in today. So that sense of contradiction, I think, is important to his legacy. His most significant contribution, of course, is that he was famous for his vision of human rights as a new paradigm for U.S. foreign policy but in my mind at least, perhaps even more significant is the fact of his unwillingness to sanction military intervention or airstrikes as a customary tool of U.S. foreign policy which makes his presidency a historically unusual interlude between the major military commitments of both the Vietnam era and the nearly relentless aerial bombardment from the Bush senior administration onwards, not to mention all the small wars of the Reagan era. So even as his presidency shares these elements with the Cold War figures and those who come afterwards, and even though this commitment to human rights was sometimes criticized for being selective, or for precisely perhaps because of its selective nature, it was sometimes criticized as being a fig leaf for more traditional or naked American national security interests, it nonetheless did function I think at this important interlude and offered a promise difficult to realize in the context of the Cold War. It offered a promise for a new way of doing U.S. foreign policy and certainly the president, or the former president, really built upon and worked very hard to promote that vision of human rights in his post-presidency years.” WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, RUTH LAWLOR, SAYING: “The two singular achievements, or the two singular foreign policy achievements of the Carter administration are in the news again today for tragic reasons. Those are, of course, the crisis in the Israel-Gaza conflict and also the Panama Canal treaty which, you know, Donald Trump has been speaking about his desire to reclaim the Panama Canal recently. And so it does appear that if we if we look at those achievements from a new light, from our vantage point today, they look less secure and more fragile than they did even a few years ago. It was certainly important that Carter committed himself to the peace process as he did but the fact that Palestinians weren’t included in those in those talks, the fact that the West Bank problem, the issue of settlements there was not resolved, and the fact that the use of the language of autonomy rather than sovereignty or self-determination meant that the seeds of continual conflict were going to emerge from the Camp David Accords and from the Oslo Accords later.” WHITE FLASH (SOUNDBITE) (English) ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, RUTH LAWLOR, SAYING: “You know, Carter was a man of his time. I think that in his vision of a policy of potential non-intervention, of putting human rights at the center of U.S. posture in the world, there was the possibility for a different kind of U.S. power that would not lead to the emergence of the crisis that beset his administration and has beset other administrations as well. Carter himself mischaracterized or misunderstood third world nationalism and the opposition to U.S. imperialism or the protection of U.S. imperialism in the world which made it difficult for him in the context of something like the Cold War to deal with a really changing world. You know, the world in the 1970s was on the cusp of a transition between two world orders. But I think that it’s precisely because that vision is so powerful and so attractive to so many Americans, especially in the wake of the geopolitical chaos that has come out of the legacy of the Iraq War that we’re still dealing with at the moment, that is an attractive vision and one that I think could be, could be looked at again and built upon in order to, to both make real those commitments to human rights and also to help solve some of the crisis of the social fabric of the United States that have rocked the domestic political scene as well.”
  • Embargoed: 13th January 2025 16:54
  • Keywords: Gaza Israel JIMMY CARTER Palestinians Panama Canal U.S. PRESIDENT U.S. foreign policy human rights interventionism
  • Location: KILDARE, IRELAND & TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
  • City: KILDARE, IRELAND & TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
  • Country: US
  • Topics: North America,Government/Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA002008130122024RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's focus on human rights offers the “promise” of a different approach to U.S. foreign policy, said Cornell University Assistant Professor of History Ruth Lawlor following Carter’s death.
    "His most significant contribution, of course, is that he was famous for his vision of human rights as a new paradigm for U.S. foreign policy but in my mind at least, perhaps even more significant is the fact of his unwillingness to sanction military intervention or airstrikes as a customary tool of U.S. foreign policy," Lawlor said. "Even though this commitment to human rights was sometimes criticized for being selective, or for precisely perhaps because of its selective nature, it was sometimes criticized as being a fig leaf for more traditional or naked American national security interests, it nonetheless did function I think at this important interlude and offered a promise ... for a new way of doing U.S. foreign policy."
    Lawlor said the former president, who died on Sunday (December 29) at the age of 100, led the nation during an interlude between different geopolitical orders.
    Carter's two greatest foreign policy achievements - the Camp David Accords and the Panama Canal treaties - appear "fragile" in hindsight, Lawlor added, in light of the Israel-Gaza conflict and incoming President Donald Trump's statements that he is willing to reassert U.S. control over the Panama Canal, which it administered for decades before handing over to Panama in 1999.
    (Production: Arlene Eiras)
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