President Carter and His Performance
- Jan 4, 2025
- 3 min read
Former US President Jimmy Carter just died at the age of 100. When Carter was president, I was still in China. Hence I knew little about him. Later (Reagan years) I was a Ph.D. student at Duke. I was puzzled about why President Nixon was bad. After all, he had made great contributions to world politics including opening the door to China and reducing tensions with the Soviet Union. One of my American classmates even said that Nixon should be put in jail (shocking to me). Now I knew that he must be a hardcore Democrat. I heard President Carter was bad too (perhaps from someone on the right). I asked my host family, who was a professor at Duke. What he said about Nixon was beyond me. (Like most Mainland Chinese at that time I was ignorant of the rule of law. Many Mainland Chinese still have no idea of the rule of law.) But I did understand the case of Jimmy Carter. Carter was an ordinary man and a farmer and did not know how to run a big nation. Although I did not realize the weight of these words, I still got the basic idea.
In the wake of President Carter’s death, Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, began his commentary with the following:
Carter, who died at age 100 on Sunday, was a man of decency, character and principle. It’s right that his long life of service to the ideals he believed in, his personal decency, his character in an era not over-endowed with political leaders of character, should be fully honoured by his nation, and by everyone who values integrity. It’s also important that we honour the facts.
And the facts are he was a very poor president. He was incompetent at running his own administration and almost all his policy instincts, domestic and foreign, were wrong.
He had one outstanding achievement – brokering a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. That was a huge achievement and it’s the one big plus of his presidency. But there were plenty of minuses. Many stemmed from two facts.
America’s enemies didn’t fear Carter, and America’s allies couldn’t rely on him.
………
The last sentence in the above passage was devastating because that was the main responsibility of the American President.
Two more high-quality commentaries: one by Sen. Tom Cotton [2], who is a devout Christian and outstanding Senator. Another by Bill O’Reilly [3], one of the most senior journalists still alive. David Rubenstein once worked for Jimmy Carter, and now is a top capitalist and a scholar on Presidents. [4] seems to be an objective assessment.
The above could be puzzling to Mainland Chinese. The root problems are twofold. 1) Western political philosophy is much more complicated than the Chinese one. 2) The problem of political leadership or stateman is extremely complex and difficult. Read [5-7]. The chapter 7 of [5] on Niccolò Machiavelli addressed this topic head-on.
References:
GREG SHERIDAN, Carter a kind man but poor president, Australian 31-12-2024 p1
Sen. Tom Cotton on Carter’s legacy, Joe Biden’s…and what Trump should aim (1-1)
Bill O'Reilly: Jimmy Carter ‘wasn’t a good president but tried’ to be | NewsNation (1-3)
Full interview: David Rubenstein on "Face the Nation" (many presidents 12-29)
Steven B. Smith, “Political Philosophy,” Yale University Press, 2012.
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