Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. Carter did this with a tough but deft combination of soft and hard power. On one hand, he opened the door to Reagan’s delegitimization of the Soviet system by focusing on human rights; on the other hand, Carter aggressively funded new high-tech weapons that made Moscow realize it couldn’t compete with Washington, which in turn set off a panicky series of self-destructive moves under the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Carter thus teed up what came to be viewed, unfairly, as his successor’s sole triumph. His repeated avowals of human rights for people behind the Iron Curtain were seen by stunned Soviet leaders, at the time, as outrageous interference in internal matters. (“What kind of man is he with this ‘human rights,’” former Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko sputtered at one point. “He is always bringing up human rights, human rights, human rights. What for?”) His policy was also criticized as dangerously simplistic by U.S. policy experts who preached realpolitik and detente, among them former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former U.S. diplomat George Kennan.
But to those behind the Iron Curtain, Carter’s words were a trumpet blast. In a personal note to the Soviet Union’s premier dissident, physicist Andrei Sakharov, in 1977, Carter wrote “human rights is the central concern of my administration.” Sakharov later took that message to then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Labeled an enemy of the state, Sakharov was eventually exiled to Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia). But that moment began a great internal battle that would culminate, ultimately, in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Long before Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, it was Carter who transformed U.S. policy from Cold War containment and detente to one of subtle confrontation—changing the world of the last century and also setting the stage for this century.
“I believe historians and political observers alike have failed to appreciate the importance of Jimmy Carter’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,” Robert Gates, a former senior intelligence advisor to Reagan (and later Presidents George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s defense secretary) wrote in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. “Carter prepared the ground for Reagan in the strategic arena, in confronting the Soviets and Cubans in the Third World, and in challenging the legitimacy of Soviet authority at home. He took the first steps to strip away the mask of Soviet ascendancy and exploit the reality of Soviet vulnerability. Unfortunately for Carter, until now hardly anyone has known.”