Neil Hicks is the senior director for advocacy at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, currently based in Brussels. He has worked on human rights issues in the Middle East and North Africa for over 40 years, including at Human Rights First and Amnesty International.
The longest-living president in American history, Jimmy Carter was the first of what has become an inglorious succession of U.S. presidents to have been overwhelmed by events in the Middle East. For Carter, who died late last month at the age of 100, it was the Iranian revolution of 1979, and especially the crisis of the American hostages taken during the post-revolutionary raid on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which came to define a foreign policy that had slipped beyond the control of the man in the White House.
When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980, he began a policy of revenge against the Islamic Republic, a bipartisan conviction in Washington that has distorted U.S. policy toward the Middle East ever since. Reagan's misadventures led to the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut at the cost of 241 American lives and a humiliating withdrawal of U.S. troops from Lebanon that gave momentum to the rise of Hezbollah. President George H.W. Bush then cemented Washington's alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies that became another poisonous shibboleth of U.S. regional policy.
With Democrats back in power in Washington in 1993, President Bill Clinton presumed to bring a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the Oslo Accords, but instead empowered Israel to expand its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, responded to the 9/11 attacks with a calamitous "global war on terror" that fueled authoritarians around the world, especially in the Middle East, the third pillar of an unstable tripod on which U.S. regional policy has teetered and crashed for decades, alongside securing access to oil and providing unconditional support for Israel. Bush further tarnished America and the West's claim to be defenders of international law with the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.
President Barack Obama promised to right the wrongs of the Bush era, but then failed to rise to the challenge of supporting the legitimate aspirations of people across the Middle East for freedom and dignity during the Arab Spring uprisings. Between them, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden then brought the restoration of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, the grim end to America's longest war. Biden failed to contain Israel's devastating response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, providing American weapons and support to further Israeli conflict in Lebanon, Yemen and beyond, while also leaving the United States complicit in a plausible genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
To his enormous credit, in his decades after leaving office, Carter stood for a different approach to America's engagement with the Middle East, often as a lonely voice among both former presidents and most American politicians. This is a region that has been the source of so much pain, failure and humiliation for the United States—and of destruction and suffering for entire societies destroyed by American weapons and American wars.
In his decades after leaving office, Carter stood for a different approach to America's engagement with the Middle East, often as a lonely voice among both former presidents and most American politicians.
- Neil Hicks
Carter, whose body will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol this week before his state funeral at Washington's National Cathedral, enunciated and sought to implement three principles in his dealings with the region. First, Carter was proud of his record of not losing a single American service member in conflict during his presidency. In this, he differed from all of his successors who too often turned to America's military might as a solution to regional problems, only to find that unresolved political problems could not be so easily bombed into submission.
Second, Carter was serious about bringing a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians, eschewing the fallacy that America's interests would be best served by unconditional support of Israel regardless of what it did. When they were signed, the Camp David Accords were widely seen in the region as a capitulation by Egypt to Israel and a betrayal of the Palestinian people. But Carter was pragmatic and hard-headed enough to insist on an agreement that would ensure Israel's security and provide Palestinians with their right to self-determination.
The Arab states finally caught up with Carter with the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, which offered Israel normalization with the entire Arab world in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied since 1967, including the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, a "just settlement" for Palestinian refugees based on U.N. Resolution 194, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. This 10-sentence proposal to end the conflict was endorsed again by the Arab League in both 2007 and 2017. But even by 2002, it was too late, as Israel's illegal settlement enterprise was deeply entrenched in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, setting Israel on the course of endless denial of Palestinian rights that has led to the present nightmare of Israel's apartheid regime and genocidal de-population of much of Gaza.
Carter spoke out against all of this for decades, calling it what it was, and paid a price in slander and isolation, even from his own political party. (When Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, Clinton publicly criticized it as "not factually correct" and "not fair.") Time and again, Carter highlighted the underlying obstacle to peace between Israel and Palestine: Israel's occupation of Arab land since 1967. "Stated simply, Israel must give up the occupied land in exchange for peace," he wrote in 2011, with the kind of characteristic clarity no other former U.S. president could apparently muster. Carter will have taken no satisfaction by being proved right at the cost of so much human suffering in what he called the Holy Land.
Carter will have taken no satisfaction by being proved right at the cost of so much human suffering in what he called the Holy Land.
- Neil Hicks
Third, Carter believed in a U.S. foreign policy centered on respect for human rights and international law. Many of his successors have paid lip service to this commitment but have universally failed miserably in its implementation. Carter was no naïve idealist. He knew that building societies rooted in democracy and human rights was a long-term project. He criticized a narrow view of human rights that failed to take into account basic needs like health and economic well-being for ordinary people. Many of the remarkable initiatives to combat diseases that have been undertaken by his signature post-presidency project, the Carter Center, demonstrate this commitment, in addition to the NGO's work monitoring elections, engaging in conflict mediation, and advocating for human rights around the world.
Similarly, Carter understood that the universal demand for human rights and the necessary vigilance to protect them must come from the ground up, so he was an early champion of the work of human rights defenders and civil society activists often working at enormous risk to themselves to create a better future for their own countries. One of the proudest moments of my career was working with the Carter Center, and Carter himself, in creating the Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum in 2003, in the aftermath of the global erosion of international human rights standards that followed 9/11 and the U.S.-led "war on terrorism." The Carter Center's staunch support for human rights defenders, and the Forum, continues to this day.
With his state funeral this week, President Carter's successors in Washington would do well to seek to emulate these principles if America wants to extricate itself from perpetual crises and entanglements in the Middle East.
