Jimmy Carter: A utopian dove or a shrewd driver of US empire?

Former US President Jimmy Carter attends an interview with Reuters in Cairo, Egypt, on 12 January 2012 (Reuters)

Many remember former President Jimmy Carter, who died on 29 December 2024 at the age of 100, as a peacemaker, a title rarely earned by US heads of state who, regardless of partisan affiliation, expand the global reach of American militarism.

In contrast, the Habitat for Humanity peacenik has garnered what political theorist Corey Robin called a "saintly halo". That he is the first American president to reach triple digits is as much commemorated as his legacy of peace-building and a commitment to human rights.

Carter functioned as a "national grandfather figure - charming, benevolent, and above all, uncontroversial", as Alex Skopic, the associate editor at Current Affairs, described.

This perception was so pervasive that many regarded Carter as too idealistic for the cynical calculations demanded by the executive office. In American common sense, to preside over the country is to expand the country's imperialist reach. Being president is a role that leaves little room for the kind of humanitarian impulses associated with Carter.

Muslim Americans have not shied away from lauding the former president. In 2014, Carter delivered a keynote address at the Islamic Society of North America's annual convention. In 2023, as he entered hospice care, the US Council of Muslim Organisations prayed for him.

Twenty-five years after his presidency, Carter would speak openly about the dispossession of the Palestinian people, endearing him to these voices in the Muslim American ummah.

Carter on Israel

He deemed Israel an apartheid state long before mainstream human rights organisations declared it as such. Carter also bemoaned the stranglehold of the Israel lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, on American elected officials.

In the US, such claims about Israeli influence have been rendered treasonous or, in their final iteration, antisemitic.

Since Carter's time, each American president has outdone his predecessor in entrenching the US-Israel alliance. Obama made a multi-year, multibillion-dollar commitment to Israel before leaving office, much to the dismay of Palestinian liberation activists who had campaigned for his election in 2008.

Trump's provocative move of the US embassy to Jerusalem further inflamed critics of Israeli expansionism. But perhaps no more full-throated support for Israel was given than that by President Joe Biden during the ongoing assault on Gaza, when the White House was lit up in blue and white as a genocidal assault was live-streamed on our smartphones.

In contrast, Carter's modicum of support for Palestinian self-determination has rendered him a darling of many Muslims in the US who see the question of Palestine as an existential concern.

Yet to hail Carter's humanitarian ambitions or label him the vanguard of Palestinian liberation is to overlook his Middle East policy - indeed, to ignore history altogether.

In fact, Carter's 1978 Camp David Accords gutted the prospects for a liberated Palestine. Carter's betrayal was apparent across the Arab world and in Iran. In severing Egyptian solidarity with Palestine, he effectively oversaw a major defeat of Arab unity around Palestine.

Today, as the state that borders Gaza seems dutifully allied with Israel and the US, much to the chagrin of the throngs of Egyptian demonstrators demanding Palestinian liberation, Carter's legacy seems ever-apparent.

The brutal legacy of Camp David has had far more lasting results - to the detriment of the Palestinians - than his 2008 book on Israeli apartheid.

Fomenting extremism

Look no further than Carter's Cold War policy toward Kabul to see how he was anything but a dovish utopian.

It was under Carter (and his cold warrior US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski) that Operation Cyclone was implemented, a secret CIA programme to fund and expand the right-wing ultra-religious Mujahideen forces in Afghanistan.

Carter's administration was the first to foment 'jihadi' ideology through its Pakistani and Saudi proxies

For Carter's administration, the goal of bringing the USSR its own "Vietnam" (that is, an unwinnable war that would weaken the country's morale and economy) was paramount. The Afghan socialist government at the time, which had implemented a programme of land reform and women's uplift, was free of Soviet influence.

But by pouring weapons, funding and training into extremist movements in Afghanistan, the USSR was provoked into defending its socialist neighbour from a right-wing takeover.

Notably, it was descendants of Operation Cyclone who carried out the 9/11 attacks in 2001 in a spectacular instance of blowback.

"Why do they joke that Bush did 9/11?" quipped a student in one of my classes. "Sounds like Carter did 9/11!"

Carter might not have plotted the towers' collapse decades after propping up the right-wing Afghan holy warriors. Still, his administration was the first to foment 'jihadi' ideology through its Pakistani and Saudi proxies.

The US-led "war on terror" that followed 9/11 saw military incursions around the world, a targeted Obama-era assassination programme that labelled all adult Muslim men enemy combatants (rather than civilians), the creation of a global archipelago of secret "black site" prisons and interrogation centres, and the designation of a cartoonishly-named "Axis of Evil" that included North Korea and Iran. It also meant the death of nearly a million people in war and the displacement of 38 million.

Here in the US, the aftermath of 9/11 meant Muslim Americans would face hate crimes, indefinite detention, and deportation. The word "Islamophobia" became common parlance to describe these conditions.

"Extremist" Islam was blamed for the World Trade Center attacks. That this extremism had its roots in Carter's Cold War-era programmes like Operation Cyclone is obscured by that most reliable of American habits: forgetfulness.

After 9/11, to bring up Osama bin Laden's connections to the US-backed Afghan jihadis or the Al Kifah centre in Brooklyn, where fundraising and recruiting for the Afghan jihad was a crucial component of Operation Cyclone, was tantamount to terrorism apologia.

This history reveals that Carter was not opposed to George W Bush. Instead, the two shared a presidential ambition: playing the Middle East for US foreign policy ambitions.

An American president

The "Carter doctrine" allowed the US to use force if necessary to protect American oil interests in the Middle East. When Donald Trump would thunder, "We're keeping the oil!" (in Syria), and Americans rightly fret about the implications of such a brash and overtly colonial utterance, they might recall: it was the peanut farmer who formalised this policy.

Political researcher Phyllis Bennis recounts Carter referring to the oil in West Asia as "our oil", a founding principle in American foreign economic policy: that is, to maintain American access to Middle Eastern oil at all costs.

That he has spoken in his later years about the plight of the occupied Palestinians stands in vivid contrast to his legacy

Neither was Carter a friend to democratic ambitions in the Middle East.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter dined in Tehran, hosted by the shah, 24 years after the US deposed the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in a CIA-backed coup.

The US reinstated the shah's monarchy, which faithfully turned over to US control the oil fields that Mossadegh had just nationalised. The shah oversaw the highest rate of execution at the time, stifling all forms of dissent and deploying his CIA-trained SAVAK police force on dissenters.

At the palace, Carter raised a glass to this same shah, hailing Iran as the most stable country in the region. Outside, Iranian demonstrators protested against the US president and America's alliance with their repressive government.

Two years later, the shah was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution, and Americans were held hostage at the embassy for over a year. Since the overthrow of the shah, the US has punished Iran for its recalcitrance, imposing a crushing economic blockade and even assassinating a key military leader (who, incidentally, had directed a substantial fight against ISIS).

This is Jimmy Carter: no utopian dove, but a shrewd driver of US empire and an enforcer of Cold War policy.

That he has spoken in his later years about Israeli apartheid and the plight of the occupied and displaced Palestinians stands in vivid contrast to his legacy, one that is (in the American usage of this term) indeed "presidential".

Perhaps Carter's greatest success was his ability to carry out the task assigned to all US presidents: expansion of an empire for the purpose of enriching a ruling elite. Carter did this while earning the reputation of a man who was too humane to fulfil the brutal necessities of the job description.

On his death, as we have completed a full year of witnessing a live-streamed genocide, the verdict is in: contrary to all suggestions otherwise, Carter was a quintessentially American president.

Nazia Kazi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stockton University, where she also serves on the Union’s executive board and as faculty advisor to the Muslim Student Association. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights. Her first book, “Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics,” is now available in an updated second edition from Rowman &Littlefield. At Stockton, she teaches classes on migration, racism, and the War on Terror. She is working on her second book, which explores the role of the US security state’s involvement in progressive movements in Muslim-majority countries.