A Different President

On foreign policy, Jimmy Carter was an innovator, more so than any recent president. He took risks and looked beyond the barrel of a gun to include human rights in global relations.

Happy 2025! ✨

Not sure I’m ready to be back yet, but I was compelled to reflect on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy legacy. I met President and Mrs. Carter once during my time at the State Department and can attest that all the things everyone says about how kind and gracious both were are true. The Elsewhere in the World section is a bit thinner than usual. We do cover Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation, Donald Trump’s surprising foreign policy comments, and other happenings around the globe, including the fires in LA. LA friends, who are too many to list here, we’re with you. 💛

Oh! And if you like this newsletter and what we do, please click the 🖤 above. If you ❤️ it, please become a paid subscriber. It goes to the amazing women who help me put it together.

Richard Nixon helmed the White House when I was born. But it was Jimmy Carter that I recall, not necessarily as the 39th US president but as a figure on the nightly news — the only time the news was on. Always with a smile, he struck me as grandfatherly. I suppose most people seem that way when you are 8 or 9. My parents were not yet US citizens, so did not vote. Not particularly political, they did not talk about his presidency or how he compared to Ronald Reagan, to whom he lost in 1980. They were disappointed when he lost however. “He was a good man,” I recall my mother saying.

Much has been made about Carter’s goodness, particularly after he left office, since his passing on December 29. For me, it is what Carter did while president that makes his tenure standout, even amid the multitude of criticisms he drew: he transformed foreign policy, breaking it out of the staid oak paneled rooms in which it had been trapped in and broadened it, giving it dimension and possibility.

Carter brokered the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. He transferred the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership. He normalized relations with mainland China. No soldiers were killed in combat under his watch. Most importantly, he carved out a space for human rights in US foreign policy.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously made human rights a centerpiece of the United Nations, with the Universal Declaration as one of the international body’s founding documents. Yet, it wasn’t until the then Georgia governor ran for the presidency that the term became a part of the vernacular. According to Alter in his excellent book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, after Jimmy Carter entered the presidential race in 1976, the term “human rights” “appeared ten times more often annually in the New York Times than it had before.”

Carter had been following the negotiations between the US, Europe, and the Soviet Union, which culminated in the Helsinki Accords signed in 1975. These were a series of non-binding agreements on security, which many were concerned about amid the Cold War, and human rights. Victor Johnson points out that the importance of including human rights in what came to be known as the Final Act is that it outlined “international human rights standards as a foundation for civil rights campaigns.” That mattered — and made the difference — for dissident groups behind the “Iron Curtain.”

In 1975, two Democratic congressmen had been pushing legislation to “stop foreign aid to allies with poor human rights records,” Alter writes. Coming after the Watergate scandal and Kissinger’s realpolitik that embraced dictators, human rights resonated with the wider public. In a speech at Notre Dame in May 1977, Carter enshrined human rights as a part of US foreign policy and announced the establishment of the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (which later became Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor). Yet, questions remained about its viability. “Murrey Marder of the Washington Post asked whether the ideas he (Carter) outlined could even be ‘workable’ in the context of geopolitical concerns of the late 1970s.¹”

Those concerns were inflation, access to energy, particularly oil, and the threat the Soviet Union, a nuclear power, posed. It was the Cold War, when everything the US did was about countering and containing communism — and, to a certain extent, winning.

Winning in the US has long been viewed through the narrow lens of military might. Carter saw beyond the barrel of a gun. For that, he was dismissed as weak and ineffectual. Yet, it was the obsessive pursuit of building missiles and defensive hardware that slowly drove the Soviet Union to collapse. And it was American soft power — the pull of freedom, creativity, and the dignity that both yield— that buried it. For Russians and Eastern Europeans the Rolling Stones, Pepsi (which made its way to Moscow in 1971, beating out Coca Cola), and Levi’s jeans represented opportunity and possibility — things their communist tyrants failed to deliver.

Possibility is what all people want, the world over. That is why much of the world has been celebrating Assad’s fall in Syria. Yet, however ironic it might be, it is also why US voters opted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. As I wrote after the November election, Harris lost more than Trump won because she and the Democrats failed to show how anything would change. Trump’s offer to disrupt the status quo appealed to enough Americans that they opted for a corrupt and convicted felon, perhaps with not so much hope but the chance that things will be different.

Good or bad, Jimmy Carter was a different president. In foreign policy, he set aside the proverbial “big stick” in order to invest in diplomacy and justice. He had, as Jonathan Alter notes, “a bias for peace” (gift article) — a rarity in any leader, let alone a US president. Carter not only steered America from conflict, he sought to avoid knee-jerk chest thumping. He recognized that with “great power comes great responsibility” and, as such, he doubled down on global engagement and shelved empty threats. For him, America needed to be a measured superpower precisely because America has so many global interests. In our “too big to fail” super-sized culture, measured is not something America is good at, much to our detriment. — Elmira

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I’m opening up my column to others. Please pitch me your op-ed idea/perspective. Let’s get more female perspectives. Email me on endeavoringe@gmail.com or respond to this post.

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Elsewhere in the World.....

On our radar...

• Oh Canada! I know, I know…but I couldn’t resist. On Monday, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau stepped down as his party’s leader, ending a decade in power and paving the way to elections. Matina Stevis-Grideneff traces the Canadian leader’s fall (with surprising Canadian pronunciations.) (The Daily)

• So if Trudeau stepped down, why is he still the country’s prime minister? Scaachi Koul explains Canada’s political process, which will require the Liberal party to select a new leader and for Canada to then hold new elections. (Slate)

• And who will that new leader be? Amanda Coletta profiles the top contenders to replace Trudeau as party leader, and who might succeed him as prime minister, including Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. (Washington Post)

US

Meanwhile, in the US… we’re getting ready to invade Greenland and Panama, make Canada the 51st state and rename the Gulf of Mexico. Busy days at Mar-a-Lago.

In a press conference this week, President-elect Donald Trump said he wouldn’t rule out using force to get Denmark to give up Greenland and Panama to cede back control of the Panama Canal, which he falsely claimed the Chinese control. They don’t. Trump had brought up buying Greenland during his first term. Why is he so obsessed with it? Haley Ott, Aimee Pichhi, and Ibrahim Aksoy note that it has a lot to do with countering China. (CBS)

Trump also said that he’d like to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. 🙄I only included this because of Mexican President Claudia Shenbaum’s response. She said that North America should be renamed América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America.” Mic drop. Megan Janetsky has the scoop (AP)

Over in Palo Alto… where Mark Zuckerberg needs a haircut… The Facebook founder has said that his platform will no longer have fact checkers. The company would go back to embracing “free speech.” Life must be nice if you’re a white man.

Suzanne Nossel notes that while this move “may make sense to enable more debate” on “hot-button” issues in the US, “they will end up loosening the spigot on ethnic vilification in parts of the world including Myanmar, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, where such hatreds can explode into uncontrolled violence.” (LA Times)

danah boyd writes that Zuckerberg is only enabling dictators and strongmen worldwide. She calls Meta the “Ministry of Empowerment.” (Linkedin)

Africa

As they head for the exit, the Biden administration calls the unfolding violence in Sudan a genocide. This Economist piece explains that because the US believed it that label would weaken America’s role as a mediator and because it didn’t want to upset the UAE, which supplies arms to one of the warring factions, Biden avoided using the term earlier. Now, he’s done “something” without really doing anything, which is probably what the Trump White House will do. (The Economist)

Asia

In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol has been trapped in his residence for the past week, fending off efforts to arrest him. Ellen Ioanes breaks down what is happening. (Vox)

The Americas

Venezuela is to hold an inauguration today, January 10. With questions surrounding Nicolás Maduro’s win, opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia have claimed that their party won and have called for nationwide protests, writes Estefanía Salazar. Machado was detained and released on Thursday. (Global Voices)

Europe

Here’s one that shocked us… The French far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen died this week. We could have sworn he was already dead. Elizabeth Pineau and Marine Strauss have his obituary. (Reuters)

Middle East

After two years, Lebanon finally has a president. Army chief Joseph Aoun was sworn in this week, writes Tamara Qiblawi. (CNN)

As a post-Assad Syria takes shape, Xanthe Scharff reminds us that women in Syria have been working for democracy and freedoms. She profiles Hind Kabawat and the Syrian Women’s Political Movement and their efforts for peace. (The Persistent)

Watch: Samantha Karlin talked to Rasha Elass about what comes next in Syria. (Samanthropolitics)

Science and Climate Change

Let’s not ignore the role of climate change in the horrifying wildfires in LA writes Jackie Flynn Mogensen. (Mother Jones)

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Opportunities

No job listings this week, but we have two exciting excursions — both are woman-led companies.

Elective Study Abroad is a new woman founded and led company offering study abroad programs for adults. And it’s a pilot course on the architecture and cuisine of Andalusia in southern Spain from March 30-April 6, 2025. Local experts guide you through Córdoba and Granada where you can go to a flamenco show and sip sherry!

Enroll before January 14th to get a special discount for Interruptrr readers: an additional 5% off per person on top of the 10% pilot discount (15% off total). See the full course description, daily schedule, fees, and other details here.

Coming Into Your Own is a 20-year woman founded and led leadership program to support women. It is having a retreat from January 30-February 2 in California. A dear friend has been on these retreats and says they’re transformative. It’s on my bucket list.

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Editorial Team

Elmira Bayrasli - Editor-in-Chief

Editors:

• Catherine Lovizio

• Emily Smith

1. Voices & Visions