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Jimmy CarterHe would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling voters.

By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, May 17, 2002, at 10:07 AM ET

Jimmy Carter's post-presidential career has been characterized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to continue the presidency that American voters ended in 1980. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in Carter's free-lance diplomatic efforts, which have been governed by an anti-democratic attitude: When faced with a conflict between democracy and peace, choose peace. Carter relentlessly promotes democracy abroad by monitoring elections and by making well-argued defenses of democracy and human rights, such as the one he made this past week in Cuba. But sometimes his ardor for peace has come at the expense of democracy—democracy in America.

During the buildup to the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, Carter unsuccessfully worked to undermine the foreign policy of America's democratically elected president, George Bush. Carter behaved as the Imperial Ex-President, conducting a guerrilla foreign policy operation that competed with the actual president's. What's disturbing about this behavior is not that Carter opposed war with Iraq. Many Democrats opposed going to war, and they worked within the American system to try to prevent a war that many predicted would be bloody (which it was, for Iraq). But Carter went further than merely lobbying Congress to oppose military action or speaking out in an effort to tilt popular opinion against the coming war. He used his status as a former president to engage in foreign policy, a deliberate effort to subvert the democratic process.

In November 1990, two months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Carter wrote a letter to the heads of state of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. He urged the countries to drop their support for Bush's proposed military solution. Instead, as Douglas Brinkley outlines in The Unfinished Presidency, his glowing but not uncritical assessment of Carter's post-presidential years, Carter asked the countries to give "unequivocal support to an Arab League effort" for peace. (As Brinkley notes, Carter's anti-war position conflicted with the Carter Doctrine he had outlined as president: Any "attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such force will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.") Right up to Bush's Jan. 15 deadline for war, Carter continued his shadow foreign policy campaign. On Jan. 10, he wrote the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria and asked them to oppose the impending military action. "I am distressed by the inability of either the international community or the Arab world to find a diplomatic solution to the Gulf crisis," he wrote. "I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive. Also, most Americans will welcome such a move." Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later accused Carter of violating the Logan Act, the law that prohibits American citizens from conducting unofficial foreign policy.

During the Clinton administration, Carter had similar difficulties coming to grips with the fact that he was not president. In 1994, President Clinton dispatched Carter to defuse an impending war with North Korea over that country's nuclear program. Again, Carter confused the foreign policy of the U.S. government with his own personal inclinations and conducted some free-lance diplomacy, this time on CNN. After meeting with Kim Il Sung, Carter went live on CNN International without telling the administration. His motive: Undermine the Clinton administration's efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on North Korea. Carter believed sanctions threatened the agreement he had worked out. By speaking directly to the world about the prospects for peace, he knowingly encouraged countries like Russia and China, which were resisting a sanctions regime. According to Brinkley, a Clinton Cabinet member referred to Carter as a "treasonous prick" for his behavior.

No matter: Carter reprised his direct-to-CNN antics during his trip to Haiti later that year. During his mission as envoy there, he also defied orders from Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Carter had a tendency to treat Christopher as his deputy secretary of state, which Christopher had been during the Carter administration, and not as his boss, which he was during the Clinton-sponsored Haiti mission.

Granted, during none of these scenarios did Carter's actions seriously damage the U.S. effort. The Bush coalition held firm, and wars with North Korea and Haiti were averted, in large part due to Carter's diplomacy. But democracy is focused on means, not just ends. Unlike John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, ex-presidents who remained active in American politics after their terms expired, Carter has set himself up as separate from American politics. He says he aims to work in areas where he doesn't interfere with the White House or the State Department. But he has no problem interfering when it suits him. His efforts to end the trade embargo in Cuba may be laudable, for example. But Carter's position is at odds with the U.S. government's, and the American system is designed for only one president, and one foreign policy, at a time.

Carter trades on his role as a former president, and many of the non-democracies in which he works have difficulty understanding that he's not a major leader in the United States. Yasser Arafat, for example, once asked Carter to serve as an intermediary with the first Bush administration, not understanding that at the time Carter was tremendously unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike. Other presidents trade on their former roles, too, cashing in by holding sinecures on corporate boards or by making lucrative speeches. But as distasteful as that behavior may be to some, it doesn't interfere with the current office-holder's ability to do his job. Imagine if all five former presidents, Ford and Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton, were perpetually jet-setting around the globe, pushing their own foreign policies and urging foreign leaders to oppose the policies put forward by America's government. That's the stuff of tin-pot dictatorships, not mature democracies.

Carter has done admirable work since he left office, particularly in Africa, where he has helped nearly to eradicate some deadly diseases. And when he's brokering a cease-fire during a civil war in Ethiopia, or promoting new agricultural techniques in sub-Saharan Africa, he's actively making the world a better place. But a benevolent ex-president is still an ex-president, and it would be nice if Carter remembered that more often.

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Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

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Reader Comments From The Fray:

Carter's only an embarrassment to the GOP moral and mental midgets that have followed him into office. He's a credit to himself and to the American people. I'm thankful we're not seeing Gerald Ford doing golf infomercials from 3rd-world Club Meds. Somebody's got to be a statesman, a representative of American ideals to the world. Be grateful for a moral and honest man.

--9-iron

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Chris Suellentrop makes too much out of the poor judgment and willfulness of a man who under any circumstances but those of the immediate post-Watergate period could never have expected to be elected President, and so never absorbed the tradition that ex-Presidents take great care not to undermine the foreign policy of their successors. He might have learned from the example Ford and Nixon set during his own administration, but he didn't. There is no larger message than that.

Any one of Carter's successors could have brought him down a peg by saying explicitly whenever he overstepped his authority that he did not speak for the United States Government. They never did, which was probably a mistake on their parts. It is true Carter never really understood why he was beaten so badly by Reagan in 1980, but this had nothing to do with his understanding of democracy. It was, and is, merely a reflection of a man too small for the office, not the first or last time the United States has run into this problem.

--Zathras

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If Carter and Bush aren't the yin and yang of American politics, I don't know who is. And that's the beauty of it as far as I'm concerned. We need each to do what they do in order to find the balance between necessity and our ideals. There is a reason this country is great and Carter represents half of it.

--Ender

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The Logan act was a piece of Federalist paranoia, from the same winning team that brought us the Alien and Sedition Acts. Unlike its better-known cousin, the Logan Act has never been used to bring a criminal prosecution--and therefore, has never been held up to judicial scrutiny. It's just been sitting on the books since 1799, spinning its wheels. The Act would be pretty unlikely to survive any serious review.

The text specifically bars only states from carrying out their own foreign policy. When you step back and think about it, this makes sense, because states are governments and people aren't. The point of a unified foreign policy is that there shouldn't be another institution in the country that could produce a binding treaty in competition with the national government. States had that kind of power until the Constitution took it away. Individuals--even ex-presidents--have never had that kind of power.

Sure, I can go off to Burundi and negotiate a tariff reduction on hats. And when I get back home, nobody will care. I can't make treaties; I can't order the Customs Service around. Anyone who mistook my words for statements of the U.S. Government was being stupid. Jimmy Carter isn't calling himself an official emissary. He's just a private citizen, saying what he thinks. What he thinks happens to disagree with official policy, and he happens to be saying it overseas, and he does happen to have been President. But none of these make his actions somehow official. The idea that his "stature" obligates him not to use it is repugnant; the idea that U.S. citizens ought to be gagged on matters of foreign policy doubly so. Twenty years out of office, Jimmy Carter is just this guy. He's pretty famous, he has some well-connected friends, and he speaks Spanish. Yeah, well so does Jennifer Lopez; I don't think anyone would accuse her of illegal illicit diplomacy if she visited Cuba.

--James Grimmelmann

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