How Jimmy Carter’s support for human rights helped win the Cold War

During his presidency and for many years thereafter, many viewed Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy as a mix of disasters—the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, the failure of détente with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan among them—and major achievements, including the establishment of diplomatic relations with China and the Israeli-Egyptian peace forged at Camp David. Despite these successes, Carter’s legacy has often and wrongly been dismissed as an inconsequential prelude to President Ronald Reagan’s return to US leadership of the free world and to a forward-leaning, ultimately successful strategy of pressure on the Soviet Union.

One of Carter’s most consequential initiatives—the general elevation of human rights in US foreign policy—has usually been overlooked. Moreover, the specific application of human rights criteria to US relations with then-Soviet-controlled Central and Eastern Europe has been underappreciated. As the tributes roll in following Carter’s death on December 29 at the age of one hundred, this aspect of his legacy deserves its due.

Introducing human rights into US bilateral relations meant that the default Cold War policy that a reliably anticommunist government could be embraced and its authoritarian nature tolerated was no longer automatic. A junior foreign service officer at the time, I recall a furious debate within the State Department between the newly established Human Rights Bureau, headed by human rights activist Patricia Derian, and the more traditional State bureaus over whether the United States should use economic leverage against the Argentinian government, a repressive military regime that had a habit of “disappearing” its opponents. Derian’s people said yes, but most of State was appalled by the thought (and corridor talk was openly sexist in dismissing human rights as a policy criterion in general and Derian in particular). Derian and her people took grief for their views, but the impact of the policy grew over time; it was not dispositive, but it meant fewer free rides for dictatorships.

The impact in Europe was more profound. An implicit axiom of President Richard Nixon’s détente was that the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, marked by the imposition of the Iron Curtain, was a sad but by then immutable fact. Official Washington and most of US academia regarded the Soviet Bloc­­—communist-dominated Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea east of West Germany—as permanent and, though this was seldom made explicit, stabilizing. Talk of “liberating” those countries was regarded as illusion, delusion, or cant. Maintaining US-Soviet stability, under this view of Cold War realism, required accepting Europe’s realities, as these were then seen. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Final Act of Helsinki, a sort of codification of détente concluded under President Gerald Ford, did include general human rights language, and this turned out to be important. However, few at the time expected the Helsinki Accords to have any more operational impact than the vague language about democracy included in the Declaration of Liberated Europe issued at the Yalta Summit in 1945, which had no impact at all.

Carter’s shift toward human rights challenged this uber-realist consensus. It came just as democratic dissidents and workers’ movements inspired by them began to gather strength in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Carter, and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, put the United States in a better position to reach out to these movements and to work with them when communist rule began to falter as Soviet Bloc communist regimes started running past their ability to borrow money on easy “détente terms,” making them vulnerable. More broadly, by elevating human rights in the mix of US-Soviet and US-Soviet Bloc relations, Carter put the United States on offense in the Cold War and on the side of the people of the region.

In 1978, a Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyła, was elected pope John Paul II. In 1980, workers’ strikes at a shipyard in Gdańsk exploded into a national movement—Solidarity—that about ten million Poles joined within a year. Later that year, the Soviet Union, alarmed by Solidarity’s rise, started threatening to invade Poland, as it had Czechoslovakia in August 1968. At that time, the Lyndon Johnson administration, consumed with Vietnam, barely reacted. This time, the Carter administration warned the Soviets not to invade Poland. The United States under Carter was no longer ceding Central and Eastern Europe to the Soviets’ undisturbed control, as “their” sphere of influence.

Reagan’s support for Solidarity, the sanctions he imposed on communist Poland and the Soviet Union after Poland instituted martial law in December 1981, and his support for democracy around the world embodied in the new National Endowment for Democracy (of which, full disclosure, I am a board member) that he inspired have rightly been lauded since. However, these successes were built on a foundation that Carter laid down. Carter from the center-left and Reagan from the right brought together a consensus that US interests could be advanced through support for US values abroad. This was not the first time US presidents made the link between values and interests, but Carter reconnected that link after the cynical and defeated Vietnam era. He did so just in time to catch the wave of freedom that swelled and crested with the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

That’s some legacy.

Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US ambassador to Poland.

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