Jimmy Carter’s challenges mirror those facing Biden

Forty-four years passed between the time Jimmy Carter left the presidency and the day he died.

Four decades seems like a long time – a record for a former US president – however, many of the challenges facing the United States in 2024 are not that different from those Carter faced, and sometimes succumbed to, in the late 1990s. 1970.

During the Carter years, the United States faced a crisis of confidence. Americans were grappling with economic turmoil at home and a series of challenges to American power abroad. Four decades later, the actors and the issues are strikingly familiar: the economy and the environment, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Years have passed, leaders have changed, but challenges remain.

Carter celebrated the power of American diplomacy by negotiating the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, but the glow of success was fleeting. The limits of American power were painfully evident during the Iranian hostage crisis a year later, after American embassy staff in Tehran were taken prisoner.

It took more than 12 months of intense efforts – diplomatic and military – to free them. The sense of American impotence contributed to Carter’s resounding electoral loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the eventual release of the prisoners came just hours after Carter left office.

The inability to shape global events, even from the most powerful office in the world, continues to plague American leaders. Current President Joe Biden’s dose of this cold reality first came during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which brought down the curtain on two decades of futile US nation-building and saw the Taliban return to power.

More recently, Biden and his diplomatic team proved unable to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel from spreading into a regional conflagration and a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Both Carter and Biden, humiliated by seemingly outmatched regional forces in Iran and Afghanistan, also faced the territorial ambitions of global powers. Carter was criticized for responding inadequately to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then widely denounced for the action he took: ordering a boycott by American athletes of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.

Biden has had greater initial success in countering the invasion of Ukraine, rallying allies to support and supply kyiv’s forces to resist the Russian advance. But as the war drags on, American resolve has been tested. The protracted, bloody conflict turned Afghanistan into a cauldron of instability that eventually gave rise to Al Qaeda and a global jihad.

The lasting impact of the war in Ukraine could have its own unexpected and deadly consequences, all of which could be blamed on this president.

In the Middle East, Carter’s triumph at Camp David has proven to be an incomplete achievement, as it secured peace between Israel and Egypt but failed to resolve the Palestinian question which, with the Gaza war, has once again become a urgent global concern. For more than a year, the war has been a constant reminder of the limits of American (and Biden’s) power.

The United States was unable to prevent the conflict from expanding to Lebanon and including, for the first time, direct hostilities between Iran and Israel. The latter, America’s closest ally in the region, has seemingly time and again ignored Biden’s advice and forged a more aggressive path on its own.

Biden has also had to manage a strained relationship with a rising China, whose current place in the world owes much to Carter’s decision to normalize US relations with the country in 1979.

That defining moment set the course for the country to become a major economic and military power, ultimately creating the geopolitical rivalry with the United States that Biden has had to contend with.

External crises tend to spill over into domestic affairs as well, and four decades ago Carter faced environmental and energy challenges partly instigated by turmoil abroad.

While the current threat of global climate change is different from the oil embargo Carter faced in the Middle East, many of his policy approaches—conservation, the transition to renewable energy, and government investment—served as the backbone of the environmental agenda that Biden helped push in Congress in 2022.

The specter of runaway inflation that the United States recently faced also dates back to the Carter years. Double-digit increases in consumer prices during the first two years of Biden’s presidency, exacerbated by the impact of the global Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, were a reminder of the darkest days of the late 20s. 1970.

The only key difference was that, unlike Carter’s situation, job growth remained strong and the U.S. economy, except for one quarter, continued to grow. That fact, however, may be little consolation for Biden, whose popularity has yet to recover from public anger over inflation.

Carter was also one of the first modern American presidents to grapple with an issue that has become an undeniable political reality for each of his successors: the American public’s often debilitating distrust of American government and institutions.

Carter, in a July 1979 speech, called it a “crisis of confidence.”

“Our people are losing that faith, not only in the government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as rulers and ultimate shapers of our democracy,” he said.

Public confidence that his government would do the right thing at least “most of the time” was 34% at the beginning of his presidency and fell to 27% by March 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. That figure has exceeded 50% only once since Carter: in the month after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For a time it may have seemed that the public’s low esteem in the Carter years was a consequence of the immediate fallout from Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when those net approval numbers fell into negative territory for the first time.

The reality, however, is that a lack of faith in government is now a reality in American politics. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the percentage of the public who believed the government would do the right thing regularly clocked in at 10%. Biden was unable to reverse this trend during his time in office, a fact that Trump was able to turn against the man who defeated him in his relentless march back to the White House.

It’s hard to avoid comparisons between Carter and the most recent one-term president, Biden.

It’s something that Trump, a two-time winner, frequently invites. His political views crystallized in the 1970s and 1980s and he sometimes references Carter as a way to jab at Democrats.

“I see everyone is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter,” Trump wrote in one of his 2021 tweet-style press releases. “I think that’s very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but “Biden has created crisis after crisis.”

Carter himself was not silent about the 45th president, telling the Washington Post that Trump was a disaster “on human rights and caring for people and equal treatment.”

At the very least, the two create an interesting contrast. Both were political upstarts who won their presidential terms against long odds. Both struggled with Washington’s domestic politics.

Carter sought to serve in the White House with humility. He wore cardigan sweaters, carried his own luggage on Air Force One, and banned the presidential anthem Hail to the Chief from playing when he entered the room. Trump seemed to enjoy the pomp and trappings of power, from lavish Fourth of July celebrations to using Air Force One as a backdrop for his re-election rallies.

Then there is the post-presidency or, in Trump’s case, a presidential interregnum. Following his re-election loss, Carter returned to his two-bedroom home in Plains, Georgia. He retired from domestic politics and worked for charities such as Habitat for Humanity. He founded the Carter Center, whose task is to combat global diseases, promote human rights and act as an independent observer of democratic elections. In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump spent his immediate post-presidency obsessed with challenging his 2020 election loss and setting the stage for his 2024 presidential campaign. His election victory and now imminent return to the White House was a plot twist that Carter never publicly contemplated, as He decisively closed the door behind him when he left office.

Carter was only 56 years old when he left the White House, and his obituaries reflect both his accomplishments after his term and during it. And they are also a reflection of how America has changed in four decades… and how much it hasn’t.