More Than Ever, Carter’s Camp David Tenacity Impresses

With the world’s attention now focused on the future of the Middle East, it is long past time to honor one of the greatest acts of statesmanship in the recent history of that troubled region: the role of President Jimmy Carter in securing the 1978 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel.

To be sure, Camp David would not have been possible without the efforts of the heroic Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, and the gritty Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin--efforts that were quite fittingly honored by the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. But Camp David would not have been successful without the extraordinary personal labors of Jimmy Carter, whose invitation to Camp David broke a negotiating logjam and who refused to take failure for an answer during 12 long days of bargaining at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains.

There is now a tendency to deprecate the achievements of Camp David. These criticisms seem to me wrongheaded. It is true that the Camp David accords did not solve the Middle East problem in any distinctive way. It is true that the Palestinian issue continues to plague the region. It is true that radicals like Hafez Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq remain as unreconciled as ever to peace. But why blame these on Camp David?

Instead of looking at the problems that remain, why not look at what was accomplished? After Camp David a major Middle East war, on the models of 1967 and 1973, was far less likely. After Camp David an unprecedented pattern of normal diplomatic relations was established between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. After Camp David Israel exchanged land, a lot of it strategic land, for peace. After Camp David it was possible to think that unending conflict between Israel and its neighbors was not a given, like the sun rising in the east. These were not mean accomplishments. In fact, they were great accomplishments. And they were Carter’s accomplishments as much as any man’s.

Amid all the current argument and commentary about the peace process in the Middle East, there are two lessons of Camp David that ought to be borne in mind:

First, the agreements reached there followed a negotiation that was itself made possible by a changed political situation: Agreement requires negotiation, and negotiation requires politicking. You just can’t start cold with negotiations and expect much of anything to happen except rhetorical cannonading. Sadat’s stunning mission to Jerusalem in 1977 and Carter’s invitation to Sadat and Begin to come to Camp David under the President’s auspices were acts of great political imagination that broke logjams, changed the political environment and made negotiation possible. Defining similar acts of political imagination--instead of arguing about spurious international peace conferences--ought to be the first order of business for the Bush Administration, the new Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, the leadership of the Palestinian movement and King Hussein of Jordan.

Second, American leadership was essential in dramatically altering the political relationships among negotiators so that negotiation would be not only possible but also successful. For reasons that seem to have involved a fascinating amalgam of religious conviction, personal self-confidence, a trace of recklessness about his own political hide and sheer American stubbornness, Carter simply would not let the Camp David negotiation fail. An American President constantly looking over his shoulder at a carping press corps and a fiddling Congress could never have pulled off Camp David. Carter took the burden of power onto his own shoulders, and the results were historic.

It is no secret that I had, and still have, the most serious differences with Jimmy Carter about America’s role in world politics. But I would be less than honest if I, as one of Carter’s critics, did not acknowledge his most signal foreign-policy accomplishment: his leadership in securing the Camp David accords. And I might suggest that the Nobel committee consider redressing a historic injustice by awarding its 1989 peace prize to the man who made the 1978 Nobel Prize to Sadat and Begin possible: the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter of Georgia.