Jimmy Carter’s Mixed Record on the Middle East

Some U.S. presidents have the (mis)fortune of having their entire foreign policy defined by their handling of one part of the world. For Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, aged 100, it was the Middle East.

There, he reached his highest point as a peacemaker and his lowest one as a seemingly inept protector of Americans. His legacy in the region is a complex one, featuring stunning triumphs and bitter defeats—and setting dubious precedents.

In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel to seek peace, creating an opening for an agreement between the heretofore bitter enemies. By July 1978, however, the talks had stalled. In an attempt to resurrect them, Carter audaciously proposed that he, Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meet at the presidential retreat at Camp David in September.

After 13 days of arduous negotiations and diplomacy, Carter brokered the Camp David Accords. The agreement had two parts: a framework for peace between Egypt and Israel, and a framework for negotiations on Palestinian autonomy. Although Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in March 1979, the Palestinian autonomy talks ultimately went nowhere, in large part due to Israeli intransigence.

This left a mixed legacy for the agreement.

On the one hand, it ended the threat of conflict between Israel and the strongest Arab state, thereby drastically decreasing the chances of another large-scale Arab-Israeli war like those that took place in 1967 and 1973. That not only prevented mass casualties and destruction, but it also reduced the possibility of a nuclear war between the superpowers—something that had seemed possible during the 1973 war when there was a nuclear standoff between the United States and Soviet Union.

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On the other hand, Egypt’s peace with Israel hamstrung the Palestinians, depriving them of their greatest source of pressure on Israel to negotiate fairly. Furthermore, the United States repeatedly missed or forfeited the chance to involve the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the negotiations. When Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, secretly met with a PLO representative, Carter fired him. Carter later expressed regret for that decision, and he had understandable reasons for not wanting to upset the Israelis—after all, without them, there could be no negotiations—or to suffer the potential domestic political costs of engaging the Palestinians. Yet, the move punctuated Carter’s failure to seriously and directly engage with “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” or to sufficiently pressure Israel on Palestinian rights.

Carter also rebuffed Soviet attempts to engage in the peace talks, which erased the possibility of securing comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, as historian Galen Jackson argues in his recent book. Without Soviet involvement, there was no way to bring the other Arab nations to the table, making a broader deal and regional peace impossible. But Cold War considerations trumped all for Carter, and instead of working on a peace deal, the Soviets joined with the Arabs to oppose the Egyptian-Israeli peace.

While Carter was preoccupied with guiding the Egyptian-Israeli talks to completion and negotiating a strategic nuclear arms deal with the Soviets, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, America’s closest partner in the Middle East, faced a revolution at home, beginning in November 1978. When pushed by his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to encourage the Shah to use force against the opposition, Carter refused, and the Shah abdicated in January. Ultimately, the radical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power and turned Iran from a close American ally into a staunchly anti-Western force in the region, despite the Carter Administration’s efforts to develop positive relations with the new government.

Iran’s collapse added to the anxiety of other American partners in the region—especially Saudi Arabia—who were unsure whether the United States would support them if revolution crept to their doors. This fear was punctuated by a border conflict between the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and its southern Marxist neighbor, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in February and March 1979, which threatened Saudi Arabia’s security. Hoping to reassure U.S. allies, Carter ordered a Navy carrier to the Gulf of Aden and used a congressional waiver to hasten arms deliveries to the YAR. That conflict ultimately ended in a cease-fire in mid-March.

Though short-lived, this crisis, sometimes called the Second Yemenite War, was a turning point for Carter’s Middle East policy that signaled his increased openness to military intervention. This willingness stemmed from the administration’s impression that the Persian Gulf was vital to American security, that the situation was rapidly spinning out of control and that it could only be rectified through a stronger pro-American security architecture in the region—what Brzezinski dubbed a “consultative security framework.” Accordingly, the administration also undertook a drastic increase in arms sales to Saudi Arabia as part of a recognition of its outsize role in American interests in the region, especially due to its oil production.

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Carter’s mettle would be tested again later that year, when, on Nov. 4, Iranian student protesters seized the American embassy in Tehran and took over 60 U.S. Embassy personnel and expatriates hostage, only releasing some of the African American and female captives in a show of solidarity. Despite tireless diplomatic efforts to free the hostages, 52 Americans languished in captivity in Iran for 444 days—a colossal embarrassment to the Carter Administration (though recent reporting has renewed debate over whether the Reagan campaign may have quietly signaled to Iran not to release the hostages while Carter was in office).

To make matters worse, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late December 1979, marking the end of the period of improved Soviet-American relations known as detente. The Soviets had grown wary of American moves in the Middle East and feared that Afghanistan could become an American proxy on their border.

Western intelligence agencies were shocked by the invasion and American policymakers worried that the Soviet Union might be angling to control the Persian Gulf and its oil, through Iran or Saudi Arabia. This possibility represented a significant threat to American interests, as it raised the specter of worsening the existing oil crisis caused by the Iranian Revolution, and prompted Carter to promulgate what came to be known—much to his chagrin—as the “Carter Doctrine.”

In his Jan. 23, 1980 State of the Union address, Carter bluntly declared that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

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The Carter Doctrine set the stage for a more militant American policy toward the Middle East and created a policy rationale that allowed for the disastrous April 1980 attempt to free the hostages in Iran (the first offensive U.S. military action in the region since 1958), the even-more-catastrophic U.S. intervention in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Carter also helped create the basing system and diplomatic relations necessary for projecting American power into the Middle East, a feat that was previously far more difficult because of the lack of U.S. bases and forces in the region.

What, then, is Carter’s Middle East legacy?

He was a peacemaker but was unable to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — something he urged his successors to do by recognizing a Palestinian state.

He believed in restraint but ended up looking weak to many Americans, which contributed significantly to his defeat in 1980.

He was an advocate for human rights and a reluctant interventionist, but paved the way for decades of American policy excesses in the Middle East, including unjust wars and torture.

This mixed record reflected not only the complexity of Carter, but also the difficulty of the region and the cross pressures facing American policymakers as they determine a course in the Middle East.

Benjamin V. Allison is a PhD student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in U.S. foreign and national security policy since 1945, especially toward the Middle East and Russia. He also studies terrorism. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.