Despite Establishment’s Dismay, Carter Displays Diplomatic Prowess

Why does the Washington Establishment have such a distaste for Jimmy Carter, our most prominent living ex-president? After all, here is a man who builds housing for the poor, writes poetry, stays with the same wife and actually cares about peace--making a major personal effort to bring it about in several difficult situations.

In the Clinton Administration, he has been responsible for major diplomatic breakthroughs in North Korea and Haiti. In Bosnia, he may actually have nudged the Bosnian Serbs closer to the negotiation table, though the results will not be known for several weeks.

The reaction of official Washington could not be more apoplectic. The Washington Post editors denounced Carter in two successive lead editorials. Former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger suggested that the former President might ruin a policy that had been almost irreparably ruined during Eagleburger’s own tenure in office. The Clinton White House tried to have it both ways. Publicly, it wished Carter well. Privately, White House officials informed journalists, of course anonymously, of their dissatisfaction with Carter’s trip, suggesting that he was naive and being used.

One facile explanation for official Washington’s intense hostility to Carter might be that since so many officials in the capital city do little to help the poor, are incapable of rhyming one word with another, acquire a trophy wife with the next highest office and do little for peace except raise the defense budget, they have little time for someone who displays the other virtues.

But there appear to be two serious reasons for the hostility. One is that the former President’s activity exposes the erosion of the imperial presidency, to which the Carter critics from both parties, and even many members of the press, are deeply devoted. The other is that any success he has only reveals the utter bankruptcy of the policies followed by the Bush and Clinton Administrations in such places as North Korea, Haiti and Bosnia.

The imperial presidency really began Dec. 7, 1941 and continued until the fall of the Berlin Wall. During that time, the U.S. government operated in a state of national emergency. Fear of another bolt out of the blue, this time perhaps with nuclear weapons, caused the American political class to concentrate enormous power in the hands of the presidency. Unlike most other world leaders, the President alone has the power to make the decision to go to war. Because of what was regarded as imminent danger, the President was also permitted to surround decision-making with elaborate secrecy.

In this system, the U.S. government operated like a monarchy in the field of foreign affairs. The President became all-powerful and, because of secrecy, all-knowledgeable. His counselors, in turn, became the king’s privileged advisers, quick to denounce any opposition to the President’s policies as verging on disloyalty given the danger the country faced.

Press pundits cooperated in the game. Their authority depended on their access to the monarch and his privileged advisers with knowledge of state secrets.

But do we still need such an arrangement? In a post-Cold War world, with economics replacing politics as the core subject of foreign policy, such attitudes may be out of date. The imminent danger is gone. So is the rationale for the concentration of power in the hands of the presidency. So is the justification for extreme secrecy.

In these new circumstances, the old American tradition of citizen diplomacy is beginning to reassert itself--and no one has exploited the new opportunities more brilliantly than Carter. U.S. history, in fact, is replete with the efforts of citizens to “improve” on the policy of their government. The practice began in 1798, when George Logan, a friend of Thomas Jefferson, went on his own authority to France to secure its accord with the United States. He had some success, but reaped criticism from Jefferson’s friends. The U.S. Congress then passed the Logan Act, which provided punishment for any citizen who, without authorization, tried to influence the conduct of a foreign government toward the United States in periods of controversy.

That act, still on the books, has never been enforced and probably could not be without infringing upon the constitutional rights of Americans. Indeed, the very role of the press in American society makes implementation of the act almost implausible; for a free press daily influences the conduct of U.S. foreign policy without authorization.

The beginning of an exit strategy for the Cuban missile crisis began over a lunch between ABC correspondent John Scali and a Russian KGB agent. During the Vietnam War, Administration officials were livid when U.S. journalists visited Hanoi, but there was little they could do about it without provoking a constitutional crisis. Senators denounced CNN’s Peter Arnett for remaining in Baghdad during the Gulf War but, in the end, accepted his “unauthorized” intervention.

Nor is there any way to bar U.S. political figures who force their way into the process. Members of Congress travel the world interfering in policy, often uninvited. During the Carter Administration, aides of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) showed up uninvited at the London talks on Rhodesia and attempted to influence the negotiations, to the consternation of the Carter White House. The effort failed and the talks succeeded.

Jesse Jackson flew to Syria in January, 1984, to persuade the government there to release Lt. Robert O. Goodman Jr., who had been shot down on a bombing mission over central Lebanon. Jackson was roundly denounced until he came home with Goodman, and Ronald Reagan had the good sense to schedule a ceremony on the White House lawn.

Today, more than 1,000 U.S. state and local governments are conducting their own foreign policy according to research carried out by Michael Shumann of the Institute of Policy Studies. Their efforts forced the Reagan Administration to shift its policy toward South Africa, provided sanctuary to illegal aliens fleeing the civil wars of Central America and pressed the cause of human rights in various dictatorial governments. This movement toward “local foreign policies” is so large it cannot be stopped.

Carter, then, is only the most prominent of a growing number of Americans participating in the policy process. He has attracted more attention both because he is a former President and because he has chosen the most difficult cases. He has moved where the U.S. government has pursued such an inept diplomatic course that it left the country with few options other than force when the country was unwilling to go to war.

Thus, the Bush and Clinton Administrations demonized the North Korean, Haitian and Bosnian Serb leadership, to the point that we had no effective diplomatic contact. Yet, we were left with a strategy that assumed diplomatic contact--because our allies in Seoul and Tokyo were unwilling to wage war against North Korea; the U.S. Senate was unwilling to support an invasion of Haiti, and the American people were unwilling to occupy Bosnia.

Carter has brilliantly exploited these contradictions to create a unique diplomatic role for himself. Those who criticize him should ask whether there was an alternative. Was the U.S. government, in each case, not in a position where it wanted to shift course but for domestic political reasons found it difficult?

Indeed, when governments demonize one another, there are limited diplomatic opportunities, unless some impartial third party--like Carter--takes the initiative. Thus, the diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization was due to two Norwegian sociologists rather than to the U.S. secretary of state, who could not take an impartial position between Israel and the PLO.

Administrations must learn to exploit these private efforts rather than resist them. If Carter comes up with proposals in Bosnia that trouble Washington, any Administration should be strong enough to say no. But it should also be wise enough to accept a diplomatic opening if one develops that it did not expect and that a former President helped create.