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 – but many of the challenges facing America in 2024 are not so different from the ones Carter faced and at times succumbed to at the end in the 70s.

The US during the Carter years faced a crisis of confidence. Americans were grappling with economic turmoil at home and a number of challenges to US power abroad. Fast forward four decades and the players and 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 brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, but the glow of success was fleeting. The limits of American power were painfully apparent during the Iran hostage crisis a year later, after US embassy officials in Tehran were taken prisoner.

It took more than 12 months of intense diplomatic and military efforts to free them. A sense of American helplessness contributed to Carter's landslide election loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, with the final release of the prisoners coming just hours after Carter left office.

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

Most recently, Biden and his diplomatic team proved unable to prevent the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel from escalating into a regional conflagration and a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Both Carter and Biden, humbled by seemingly unbeatable regional powers in Iran and Afghanistan, also faced the territorial ambitions of global powers. Carter was criticized for an inadequate response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then widely vilified for the move he made – ordering a boycott of American athletes at the 1980 Olympics. in Moscow.

Biden had more early success in countering the invasion of Ukraine, rallying allies to support and supply Kiev's forces in resisting the Russian advance. But as the war drags on, American resolve is tested. The extended bloody conflict turned Afghanistan into a cauldron of instability that eventually gave birth to al-Qaeda and global jihad.

The lingering impact of the war in Ukraine may have its own unexpected and deadly consequences—all of which can be laid at the feet of this president.

In the Middle East, Carter's triumph at Camp David proved to be an incomplete achievement, securing peace between Israel and Egypt but failing to resolve the Palestinian issue, which with the war in Gaza has once again become an 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 US failed to prevent the escalation of the conflict in Lebanon and the involvement for the first time of direct military action between Iran and Israel. The latter, America's closest ally in the region, has time and again seemingly ignored Biden's advice and forged a more aggressive path himself.

Biden also had to deal with strained relations with a rising China, whose current place in the world owes in no small part to Carter's decision to normalize US relations with the country in 1979.

That watershed moment set the course for the country to become a major economic and military power — ultimately creating the geopolitical rivalry with the US that Mr. Biden had to contend with.

Foreign crises tend to spill over into domestic affairs, and four decades ago Carter faced environmental and energy challenges, in part caused by turmoil abroad.

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

The specter of runaway inflation that the US has faced recently also harkens back to the Carter years. Double-digit spikes in consumer prices in the first two years of Biden's presidency, fueled by the shock of the global Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, were a reminder of the darkest days of the late 1970s.

One key difference was that, unlike the Carter situation, job growth remained steady and the US economy, except for one quarter, continued to grow. That fact, however, may come as cold comfort to Biden, whose popularity has yet to recover from public anger over inflation.

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

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

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

Public confidence in his government to do the right thing at least “most of the time” was 34 percent at the start of his presidency and fell to 27 percent in March 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. That number has risen above 50% only once since Carter, in the month after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For a time, it may have appeared that the low public esteem of the Carter years was a consequence of the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, when those net approval numbers first fell into negative territory.

The reality, however, is that lack of faith in government is now a fact of life in American politics. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the percentage of the public that believed the government would do the right thing regularly registered among teenagers. Biden failed to reverse this trend during his tenure — a fact that Trump managed to reverse against the man who beat him in his relentless march back to the White House.

Comparisons between Carter and the last one-term president, Biden, are hard to avoid.

It's something two-time winner Trump often invites. His political views crystallized in the 1970s and 1980s, and he sometimes mentioned Carter as a way to get Democrats fired up.

“I see everyone comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter,” Trump wrote in one of his tweet-like press releases in 2021. “It seems to me that this is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden created crisis after crisis.”

Carter himself has been tight-lipped about the 45th president, telling the Washington Post that Trump is a disaster “in terms of human rights and caring for people and treating people equally.”

At the very least, the two make for an interesting contrast. Both were political upstarts who won their presidential terms against great odds. Both struggled with the domestic politics of Washington.

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 relish the parade 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's the post-presidency — or, in Trump's case, a presidential interregnum. After his re-election, Carter returned to his two-bedroom house in Plains, Georgia. He retired from domestic politics and worked for charities such as Habitat for Humanity. He founded the Carter Center, tasked with fighting global disease, promoting human rights, and serving as an independent observer of democratic elections. In 2002 won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump has spent his immediate post-presidency focused on contesting his 2020 election defeat. 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 resolutely closed the door behind him when he left office.

Carter was just 56 years old when he left the White House, and his obituaries reflect both his achievements after and during his time in office. And they're also a reflection of how America has changed in four decades — and how much it hasn't.