U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981
President Jimmy Carter annotates a document while working at his desk in the Oval Office (U.S. National Archives)
Top-Level Memos to the President, NSC Records, Anchor New Publication on Carter Foreign Policy
“Eyes Only,” Annotated Records Offer Insights into Carter’s Thinking, Relationships with Vance, Brzezinski
“Top Secret” Memos Show Carter Dealing with Arms Control, Iran Hostage Crisis, Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Latest Addition to Award-Winning Digital National Security Archive Series
Washington, D.C., December 14, 2023 – The National Security Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a major primary document collection on the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The latest in the Archive’s award-winning Digital National Security Archive series, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, 1977-1981: Highest-Level Memos to the President comprises more than 2,500 communications and top-level policy-making records that Carter personally viewed and, in many cases, commented on directly.
More specifically, the collection features every declassified weekly memo to the president from his most senior foreign policy aides, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie; as well as every available meeting record of the National Security Council and its two subgroups—the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee.
The records of Brzezinski, Vance, and Muskie (and sometimes Acting Secretary Warren Christopher) constitute a unique subset of documents that were sent directly and regularly to the president by his closest foreign policy advisers. Unlike most other message traffic to Carter, these memos did not pass through institutional filters (such as the secretariats of the State Department and National Security Council) and were intended for the president’s eyes only. The NSC meeting records are included because they comprise another highly restricted avenue for decision-making utilized by Carter.
Of special interest to readers, many of the records have the president’s own handwritten annotations, which show his unfiltered thoughts and reactions to events, policy options, and opinions floated by his top advisers.
Topics cover the gamut of foreign policy issues during this pivotal period, notably the conflict in the Middle East, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, SALT talks with Moscow, the opening of diplomatic relations with China, the Nicaraguan revolution, energy, and a growing emphasis, championed by Carter, on global human rights in U.S. foreign policymaking.
Among the highlights is a record that sheds light on the ongoing historical question about the nature and extent of support the Carter administration provided to the Afghan rebels. Attached to Brzezinski’s summary of a December 28, 1979, meeting on Iran and Afghanistan is a copy of the original Presidential Finding, signed by Carter, authorizing covert action in the form of “lethal military” aid to “the Afghan opponents of the Soviet intervenion.”[1]
Among other highlights from the collection posted today are:
- A Vance memo just one week into the new administration describing plans for pursuing the landmark Panama Canal treaty
- A highly positive, somewhat premature verdict from the secretary of state on the impact of Carter’s new human rights approach on some Asian allies
- A Brzezinski memo counseling caution on SALT and other arms control matters with Moscow
- Vance’s recounting of one of numerous one-on-ones with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in which the two diplomats explore different ways to deal with the unexpected early chill in superpower relations
- A 17-page NSC meeting transcript laying out the administration’s thinking about the upcoming, historic Camp David summit with Egyptian and Israeli leaders
- A detailed summation for the president by his NSC staff on the new relationship with the People’s Republic of China
Electoral politics are front and center in another fascinating memo where Brzezinski describes various ways that President Carter could use his foreign policy powers to “significantly influence the outcome of the [1980] elections.” Lacking the pretext for a “sudden and dramatic stroke” that might turn the tide in the election, Brzezinski suggests that Carter attack the foreign policy proposals of Republican nominee Ronald Reagan as “escapist and dangerous” and that he consider making bold policy initiatives in Iran or Afghanistan.
The timing of this publication is fitting. In the years since he left office, Carter (like Presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush before him) has undergone a number of reassessments, as recently as in the past two years, which have presented a much more positive portrayal of the 39th president than previous evaluations. The best-known of the recent biographies are Kai Bird’s The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown, 2021), Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2021), and longtime adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat’s President Carter: The White House Years (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018).
These biographies generally praise Carter for his intelligence as well as his principled stand on certain issues. These assessments are backed up by the documentary record which, while giving plenty of grist to policy critics, also shows a president who was extremely well-informed about many of the minutiae of international politics, confident in his views, tough-minded, and not intimidated by critics.
The 2,500 documents that make up U.S. Foreign Policy in the Carter Years, edited by Autumn Kladder, come primarily from the files of the Jimmy Carter Library, as well as from Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources. They offer a broad overview of his administration’s approach to the fraught arena of international affairs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a time of transition—before the great changes in Cold War arch-rival USSR, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, that culminated in the collapse of Soviet-led Communism, but already marked by the crumbling of Moscow’s economic strength and international clout. The Carter years also saw the emergence of new political phenomena like Islamic fundamentalism, milestone events such as the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the steady rise of China as a global power.
Several of these episodes—the upheavals in the Middle East and Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the continuing oil crisis—were undeniably tests that Carter and his team seemed poorly equipped to handle, and these undoubtedly contributed to his electoral trouncing by Ronald Reagan after just one term. (Biographer Jonathan Alter describes him as “a famously unlucky president.”[2]) But a number of them were unalloyed successes: the Camp David accords; the breakthrough in diplomatic relations with China; the SALT II treaty; the Panama Canal treaty. In the opinion of increasing numbers of observers, including Alter, those accomplishments outweighed the fiascoes and misfortunes—some of which did not play out until his final year in office—that Carter’s administration endured.
Along the way, Carter made his mark in other, often underappreciated, ways: for example, establishing human rights as a principle of U.S. policy (if unevenly applied); recognizing the global environment as a critical priority; and providing unheralded yet essential support to the Solidarity movement in Poland. All of these issues are at the core of the revealing records in the DNSA collection, along with the rest of the panoply of world affairs which so occupied the Carter administration during his four-year term.
“These personal memos from Jimmy Carter’s closest advisers show the policy process unfolding in real time,” said Malcolm Byrne, the Archive’s research director. “Being able to read the president’s handwritten comments gives us an extraordinary window into his thinking on a slew of critical issues.”
Published by ProQuest, part of Clarivate, the new collection is available through the Digital National Security Archive series, which provides access to primary-source documents on U.S. foreign policymaking during the Cold War and beyond.
THE DOCUMENTS
Document 1
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-7-17-7-8-1
One week after Carter’s inauguration, this memo from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance showcases two high-profile national security issues in Latin America: the Panama Canal treaty negotiations and Brazil’s nuclear program. Other issues covered include the Israeli reaction to the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon, Vietnam MIAs, Rhodesia, and Egypt’s economic crisis.
On the Panama Canal negotiations, which would be one of the president’s main diplomatic achievements, Vance tells Carter that the NSC Policy Review Committee has recommended that his administration reaffirm the “Tack-Kissinger principles” negotiated by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Panama’s foreign minister, Juan Antonio Tack. (The statement of principles is attached at the end of this memo.) Carter’s handwritten annotation observes that “Tack outtraded Kissinger to begin with.” On Brazil, Vance tells Carter that he “sent a personal message” to the foreign minister telling him that “we, of course, recognize the Brazilians’ pressing energy needs and are ready to discuss ways in which they can be met without running substantial dangers of nuclear proliferation.”
Regarding Lebanon, Israel’s foreign minister, Yigal Allon, told Vance that Israel viewed the presence of Syrian troops “as a threat to Israel’s security” but that Israel would allow the Syrians “several days grace to achieve a withdrawal.” In the meantime, Israel would “increase their readiness in the area.”
Document 2
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-128-12-5-13-7
This relatively lengthy memo from Vance to the president, with several of Carter’s handwritten notations, starts off with a topic that was high on Carter’s list of policy priorities – human rights. The Democrats had made the issue a centerpiece of their presidential campaign in 1976 to play on public distaste for the policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations (closely tied to the approach of Henry Kissinger). Here, Vance offers an early (just two weeks into the presidency), highly positive assessment of the impact of Carter’s new attitude on South Korea and Indonesia, two allies regularly disparaged for their poor records on the issue. He even notes reports that Indonesian President Suharto adjusted his own thinking after reading Carter’s inaugural address. Carter writes “good” next to the entry. Unfortunately, time would show that the problem of human rights would be much harder to crack as friendly regimes from Latin America to Asia persisted in many of their most reviled practices and the Carter administration came under fire for appearing to do more to continue U.S. support for them than to live up to campaign promises.
The rest of Vance’s memo gives a flavor of the variety of issues that typically cross a president’s desk on a daily basis – in this case ranging from events in southern Africa to presidential appointments (Carter writes “I’m proud of this” next to an item about ambassadorial appointees), to Soviet human rights violations to arms sales to the treaty making process.
Document 3
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-17-26-8-3-4
The U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were a major foreign policy priority of the Carter administration. The last administration had failed to complete negotiations for SALT II, and President Carter believed that an agreement restricting strategic arsenals was important for ratcheting down superpower tensions and reducing the threat of nuclear war. (Brzezinski was more skeptical and tended to see arms control talks as a test of Soviet intentions.) Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev eventually signed the SALT treaty in June 1979. Here, reflecting his typical wariness about treaty negotiations with Moscow, Brzezinski underscores several points about SALT that were raised during a meeting of the NSC’s Special Coordination Committee (SCC), which he chaired.
The talks constitute a “long-term process requiring our patient efforts to try to achieve an agreement,” according to this memo. The U.S. “should play down the significance of the May meeting between [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei] Gromyko and the Secretary of State,” Cyrus Vance, Brzezinski adds, and the SCC should “undertake a detailed examination of the phasing of [arms] reductions in the comprehensive proposal … to determine the sensitivity of changes of individual elements and how they would impact on U.S. and Soviet interests.”
Document 4
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-128-12-9-4-3
This memo from Secretary of State Vance to Carter comes at a tense time in U.S.-Soviet relations. The administration entered office just a few months earlier seeking simultaneously to reduce tensions with Moscow and to rein in Soviet behavior both at home and abroad. Indicative of the high priority of the relationship, Carter had written a personal letter to Brezhnev in February, and in March Vance undertook an early visit to Moscow. But the Soviets reacted very negatively to what they saw as unacceptable demands by the Americans—on the one hand to make deep cuts in Soviet weapons systems and on the other to directly address their human rights problems. It would be years before the Americans fully understood how poorly their demands had resonated in the Kremlin.
This gap in mutual understanding comes through in Vance’s memo to Carter in which he seems somewhat at a loss as to why the Soviet press has been leveling attacks on the U.S. president and why relations in general are so sour. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin is basically in favor of improving the atmosphere and has some suggestions to offer in that vein. His “personal reaction” to the idea of a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting is that it “would be desirable because he believed that the two of you [Carter and Brezhnev] would get along well once you met face to face and this could serve to dispel the mutual suspicions that appear to exist” between the two superpowers. On the ever-present topic of human rights, Vance raises the matter of detained Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, saying he told Dobrynin that to prosecute him “would surely create a bad view of the Soviet Union in the eyes of world opinion.” In a handwritten annotation, Carter writes, “You may tell them officially that S. has never been CIA.”
Document 5
CIA Historical Collections Division AR 70-14
Among the most consequential achievements of the Carter administration was the signing of the Camp David Accords between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel. Sixteen days before that event, this memo captures some of the complexities involved in the process, raised during a NSC meeting among President Carter, Brzezinski, CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Secretary of State Vance, and others held to prepare for the upcoming talks. The discussion covers a number of interesting topics, including the personalities of each leader, the roles of their advisers, the Saudi view of the talks and possible reaction to an agreement, the consequences of failing to reach an accord, and a possible U.S. military role in security guarantees connected to an agreement. Other records from the newly published collection describe further details about the Arab-Israeli conflict, including assessments of the key players and issues that threaten to obstruct an accord.
Document 6
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-07-230
One of the epic foreign policy disasters Jimmy Carter faced was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas day 1979. The Soviet move shocked the world, but the U.S. administration came under especially heavy criticism from the right because of accusations that its soft treatment of the USSR and foreign policy weakness in general had opened the door for what many saw as naked Soviet aggression. The invasion was closely connected to what was arguably the administration’s most profound political crisis (combining both foreign and domestic elements) – the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, Afghanistan’s neighbor, which had occurred less than two months before. Thus, this important SCC meeting was convened to cover both subjects.
The first part deals with the impact of the hostage saga – specifically the question of oil prices, the likelihood that American captives would be put on trial in Iran, and the fascinating conclusion of the group that neither U.N. sanctions being contemplated nor even a total embargo would “be a major economic blow to Iran.” The second part of the discussion relates to Afghanistan, most significantly the decision to provide covert assistance to Afghan rebel forces opposing the invasion. Against the backdrop of the Iran crisis, there is concern about the safety of American personnel still in Afghanistan. Reflecting both his foreign policy inclinations and his awareness of the political dimension of the situation, Brzezinski, a hardliner within the White House, urges “that we must make this costly for the Soviets very quickly. Within three days we will see growing criticism of the U.S. for doing nothing and being afraid to act.” The discussion ends with the quixotic expression of hope that the invasion might help resolve the Iran crisis.
Of particular interest, the SCC summary includes an attachment – a Presidential Finding signed by Carter, authorizing “lethal military” aid to “the Afghan opponents of the Soviet intervention.” This is a key piece of the ongoing historical question about the nature and extent of support the Carter administration provided to the Afghan rebels. A Finding is a legal document required by statute to signify presidential authorization for any CIA covert operation beyond intelligence collection. It is unusual for such a sensitive record to be declassified.
Document 7
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-128-10-3-6-9
The U.S. opening to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1978-1979 was another landmark accomplishment of the Carter administration and is treated in several records published in the National Security Archive’s latest publication. In this flattering memo to President Carter assessing his administration’s China policy, former NSC staffer Michel Oksenberg says that he feels “confident future historians will see your China policy as the most enlightened and effective one our country every had.” Oksenberg cautions Carter not to play “the so-called ‘China card,’” advising him to avoid using China “tactically” in the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. He suggests that Carter carefully plan the next phase of China policy: “We have reached the end of the road map, and if we are to avoid the ‘ad hockery’ that plagues us elsewhere, you must demand now that planning begin for your second term.” Carter’s marginal annotation reads: “We should not push now for new achievements with PRC.”
Document 8
Jimmy Carter Library, NLC-128-10-4-3-1
In a sprawling and fascinating memo that indicates the scope of some of these newly published records, national security adviser Brzezinski outlines the ways that President Carter can use foreign policy powers “in a manner that could significantly influence the outcome of the [1980] elections.” Lacking the pretext for a “sudden and dramatic stroke,” Brzezinski says he “cannot offer a prescription for a major Presidential initiative … that would have significant electoral effect.”
Instead, the national security adviser proposes that Carter, 1) emphasize the “distinctive character of the Carter foreign policy,” 2) attack the Reagan foreign policy approach as “escapist and dangerous,” 3) prepare for a quick response to potential international crises, and 4) consider a number of bold policy initiatives, in Iran and Afghanistan, for example, that might raise the president’s profile.
NOTES
[1] Much of the text of Carter’s December 28, 1979, Presidential Finding was previously published in Foreign Relations of the United States (see footnote 6), but we know of no other instances where a copy of the original document with Carter’s signature has been published.
[2] Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2021), p. 216.
No comments:
Post a Comment