Former President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy is often remembered for its promotion of human rights and what many see as a shunning of the realpolitik diplomacy of his predecessors.
But Richard Haass, who worked in the Pentagon during the Carter administration, tells NPR that's an oversimplification.
"He was a man of peace, but he wasn't a pacifist," says Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. "He was both a realist and an idealist."
As president, he "was able to live with contradictions. And maybe that's one of the things the job takes."
Haass points to a pragmatic streak in Carter's foreign policy that often gets overlooked. Not only did he forge a peace between Egypt and Israel "that's still the foundation to the extent there's any order in that part of the world," but he signed an arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union and normalized diplomatic relations with China, he tells NPR's Morning Edition.
On the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty that set the stage for the return of the vital waterway to Panama after 75 years of U.S. control, Haass says Carter "realized that was the best and only way to keep the canal open, despite the pressure from the American right not to do it."
Haass says Carter might have done a better job of messaging on the canal treaty. "The larger point is [that] American foreign policy, since the get-go has had a tension in it between idealism and realism, between principles, but also politics. And it affected Jimmy Carter, just like it will affect Donald Trump going forward."
Ultimately, however, Haass — like many historians — acknowledges that the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 and the drawn-out hostage crisis that followed may have been Carter's undoing, precipitating his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter allowed himself to "become hostage, if you will, to the hostage crisis in Iran," Haass says.
Equipment failures plagued a U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages in 1980.
Haass says, "If he had maybe sent one more helicopter and the hostages had come back, he might he might have been reelected."
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