Carter earns
‘nobel’ award

By Zbigniew Brzezinski
and Stuart E. Eizenstat
THE WASHINGTON POST

The long-delayed and much deserved Nobel Peace Prize for Jimmy Carter is the right occasion to review his presidency. It is often said that second-term presidents – no longer concerned about reelection – tend to be bolder and more innovative. Carter acted from the start as if he was a second-term president, tackling issues where other presidents had feared to tread while remaining indifferent to the political calculus.
Conviction, not expediency, and principle, not politics, defined his presidency. The result – his eventual electoral defeat notwithstanding – was a string of accomplishments with long-term effects from which we still benefit today. Carter’s staff used to joke ruefully that the worst way to influence a decision was to argue that it would help him politically. But this freed him to act boldly, even though it might be politically unwise.
He was the first U.S. president to state unambiguously that the Palestinians deserved “a homeland” in a peace treaty that would ensure Israel’s security. Together with his emphasis on halting settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, this assertion created a political firestorm, and it took more than a decade before another president dared to say that a Palestinian state should be part of a peace settlement. But Carter did not stop with words. He showed at Camp David that only with direct presidential involvement can peace be achieved in the Middle East, pressing both Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat into compromises that made an Israeli-Egyptian peace possible.
Carter was manifestly impatient with historical anomalies that had outlived their day. He rammed through the Panama Canal Treaty, even though conservative Republicans accused him of a giveaway. Yet without that treaty the canal today would be far less secure and our relations with Latin America far less positive. He also insisted on normalizing relations with China and on conducting the negotiations directly from the White House to insulate the process from lobbying. Twenty years later, U.S.-Chinese relations are a stable.
Some scoffed at two major breaks Carter made with the past in U.S.–Soviet relations. Some thought it a case of naive idealism or misguided meddling in the affairs of other states. Yet by raising the standard of human rights, he put the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive. His human rights initiative emboldened dissident movements, such as Solidarity in Poland, which eventually undermined the Soviet bloc.
Carter’s views on defense matters were just as politically controversial. He concluded, years ahead of others, that the