By most scholarly rankings, Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, was far from one of America’s finest. He served a troubled single term from 1977 to 1981, marked by “malaise” and crisis after crisis that left Americans wondering what sort of future lay ahead for a country that had just celebrated its bicentennial.
Yet it was also Carter who, on the night of January 23, 1980, delivered the State of the Union address that forever changed the course of United States foreign policy and set the stage for much of what was to come in the succeeding decades. In fact, its impact can still be felt today, 40 years later.
Carter’s third and final State of the Union came at a particularly troubled time, which gave it a sense of urgency. Just two months earlier, the Iranian Revolution had resulted in the siege of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, with 52 Americans held hostage. Just over a month later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, capping off 1979 with a sense that the U.S. was losing control over global affairs. Meanwhile, Carter presided over slow economic growth, coupled with inflation and high unemployment (“stagflation”)—a problem exacerbated by high oil prices, which were elevated in part by the situation in Iran. Topping it all off was an election in November, with Carter’s re-election very much not a done deal.
This was the backdrop against which Carter delivered the most important address of his presidency. With the wife of Bruce Laingen, the senior-most diplomat held hostage, in attendance, the president uttered the proclamation that came to be known as the “Carter Doctrine”: “Let our position be absolutely clear: 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.”
The Carter Doctrine was largely the brainchild of the president’s realist national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. As Brzezinski recalled in his memoir: “The [Carter Doctrine]represented a formal recognition of a centrally important reality: that America’s security had become interdependent with the security of three central and inter-related strategic zones consisting of Western Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East-Persian Gulf area.”
While instability in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia were troubling on their own, Carter’s use of the term “outside force” made clear that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the catalyst for policy change. After a period of détente, it seemed as though the Red Menace was on the march and was now seeking control of Mideast oil fields. With the president’s declaration, the Persian Gulf was officially an arena of superpower conflict.