The downside to US political memory is that substance often counts for little. If it were taken more seriously, Jimmy Carter would be credited for having seeded the Soviet Union’s demise and Ronald Reagan would not have been canonised as a modern saint. But marketing is a powerful drug. Conventional wisdom insists that Carter played Chamberlain to Reagan’s Churchill. After four years of Carterian vacillation, Reagan grabbed the reins in 1981 and the rest is history. Except that it is shoddy history. Understanding how the US won the last cold war is key to managing the next one.
America’s distorted memory stems partly from the fact that the right adores Reagan while the left disowned Carter. Such was its sense of betrayal that influential Kennedy-era liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, refused to vote for the Democratic party in 1980 for the only time in their lives. Carter is thus an orphan of partisan historiography. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama went out of their way to ignore him. Joe Biden is the first of Carter’s successors to have paid his respects to America’s 39th president. That is no coincidence. Biden and Carter have overlapping world views.
The source of liberal disdain is twofold. First, Carter put an end to the cold war detente of his predecessors. Detente entailed the US recognising the USSR’s sphere of interest and pledging non-interference in each other’s affairs. Detente also enabled the Soviets to reach nuclear parity with the US. America’s defence spending fell by almost 40 per cent in real terms in the eight years before Carter took office. Carter reversed both. He invested in a new class of strategic nuclear weapons and installed Pershing and cruise medium-range weapons in Europe. He also undid Henry Kissinger’s neglect of Soviet dissidents and the satellite states. Charter 77, Solidarity and other protest movements took off during Carter’s presidency. “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy,” he said.
