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Reviews
| The Future Almost Arrived: How Jimmy Carter Failed to Change U.S. Foreign Policy, by Itai Sneh. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 373 pages. $34.95, paper.
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| Itai Sneh's book on Jimmy Carter's foreign policy is one of the most recent of the works on the "human rights President." It boasts documentation from the Jimmy Carter Library which, given declassification procedures these days, has probably not yet been seen by diplomatic historians. It would probably be a useful book for undergraduates, and possibly senior high school students, but it does demonstrate some weaknesses in content and analysis. |
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Sneh argues that Carter enunciated human rights ideals as part of his foreign policy and was, in fact, the first U.S. President to do so, but adds that Carter was essentially a realpolitik conservative anyway when it came to the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy goals. According to Sneh, this conservatism shone in the appointment of most of his foreign affairs advisers and the conduct of the Administration's policies. Sneh does differentiate Carter's conservatism with the more reactionary policies of right-wing Presidents such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, but Carter is not the bleeding heart liberal here that he came to be known as in the 1980s. Moreover, Sneh demonstrates that Carter was an extremely complex, and at times contradictory, person when it came to integrating human rights ideals into the day-to-day conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Sneh is not the first historian to show that Carter tried to accomplish something very difficult and was not successful, but the added details of Carter's enunciations about human rights while conducting a fairly traditional foreign policy is useful here. |
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Sneh's focus on Carter's post-presidential career may also be unknown to readers who are used to hearing only about Carter's tremendous reputation as a peacemaker and international relations arbitrator. While the primary sources here are not as revealing as those analyzing Carter's presidency since the sources cover a more recent time period, Sneh does at least open for discussion the extent to which Carter's post-presidential reputation has been crafted by Carter himself. Moreover, the documentation brings into serious question some of Carter's personal and business dealings with institutions such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and individuals such as former adviser Bert Lance. Carter's squeaky clean image may not be all that clean after all. |
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Having said all of this, however, there are weaknesses in the book. First, it is surprising, even shocking, how brief a treatment Sneh gives to the Camp David Accords and Middle Eastern affairs in general. The Camp David Accords was one of Carter's few meaningful diplomatic achievements during his presidency, and Sneh deals with the matter in a couple of pages and occasional references throughout the book. Moreover, if Sneh is dealing with Carter's inconsistencies and even hypocrisies, then the readers should know about Carter's classic realpolitik support of Pol Pot in the U.N., support that was given because Pol Pot was an ally of China and because Cambodia had been invaded by a Soviet-proxy state, Vietnam. In addition, the reader gets very little about Carter's relations with Congress and right-wing opposition to his policies. Sneh covers the Jackson-Vanik and Harkin Amendments a bit, but there is not much about relations with Congress that might shed light on the difficulties Carter had in carrying out his policies. We find out again, as we have from other historians, how horrible a manager Carter was, but we do not get much more than a mention here and there of the right-wing opposition he had to contend with from politicians such as Reagan. |
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Granted, this book is not about Carter's foreign policy per se, his relations with Congress, or his domestic opposition, but these are all matters that pertain directly to the role that human rights played in his foreign policy. There is probably not a great deal on each of these sub-topics because Sneh may have been trying to do too much in one book. He tries to cover so much, in fact, that many of the chapters look like laundry lists of topics. Finally, Sneh fails to recognize that, as Douglas Brinkley pointed out, although Carter's human rights policies were a failure on the one hand, on the other they have changed the language of international relations to a great extent. Nations take these matters much more seriously—even if only for window dressing purposes—than they did prior to 1977 and that is to a great extent Jimmy Carter's doing. |
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| Henry Ford Community College |
Hal M. Friedman |
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