Carter's Hawks

I've always wondered how Jimmy Carter went from being a center-left President in regards to foreign policy to being a Cold Warrior.  Roger Morris, former White House staffer in the 60s and foreign policy scholar, tells how (and details the involvement of current Defense Secretary Robert Gates in it as well).

At the outset, the New York Times editorially praised this regime as "rightly unruffled by the old politics of cold war confrontation." The right-wing National Review was likewise sure that Washington "will now shrink from battle with the enduring enemy." Both were wrong. No one reckoned with the 52 year-old Georgia governor and former peanut farmer, whose provincial political freshness and moral uprightness was welcomed by a Watergate- and Vietnam-weary public. Nor did they reckon with Brzezinski and an energetic assistant named Robert Gates.

As with so much else, our barely surface-scraped history has yet to show the tragic complexity that was Jimmy Carter, whose presidency one scholar would sum up as "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." There were omens of what was to come even before he took office -- his long-held support for the Vietnam War, his campaign-trail vagueness (like Brzezinski's), his administrative equivocations as governor, his steely religiosity born of a conversion following an electoral defeat. Whatever the causes, the effects would be all too plain.

Brzezinski and aide Bob Gates knew their man. With earnest conviction, habitual vacillation, and chaotic management of his soon splintering regime, Jimmy Carter -- behind what the doomed Shah of Iran once described as his "frozen blue eyes" -- would prove among the coldest of cold warriors. Four years later, when the incessant bureaucratic infighting for the President's favor was over, Vance (no pussycat) was a broken man; Brown and Turner had been sidelined; and even a victorious Brzezinski was uneasy with the wreckage they had wrought.

By then, the precedents had been set for the imperial excesses that would make the 1980s the preamble to our own post-9/11 era. Though glad to see them go, at least one beneficiary of their rule was happy with the result. "Great continuity between Carter's approach…. and that of his successor, Ronald Reagan," was how Bob Gates would proudly describe it.

When it came to the Soviet Union, Carter was typically inconsistent in his first months in office, veering between one tactic and another in arms control while a bureaucratic war over SALT II erupted around him. On Gates' recommendation, the new president met with perennial hawk Paul Nitze, now representing the Committee on the Present Danger, the latest right-wing, military-industrial front fielded to attack détente. Soon, Brzezinski and Gates had won a defining victory. They had persuaded Carter to bring in the national security advisor's old friend and onetime co-author, Samuel Huntington, as a special consultant on strategic policy. The Harvard reactionary would later become one of the gurus of the neoconservative movement (and author of the ubër-Orientalist book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order).

In the summer of 1977, his cohorts would leak to the Washington Post that Huntington's job was "to scare the Carter Administration into greater respect for the Soviet Union." Working in liaison, Huntington, Gates, and hard-liners in and out of government promptly did just that-- a process which culminated in Presidential Review Memorandum #10, (in which both Brzezinski and Gates were instrumental). A time-honored "study," using flawed or confected intelligence and meant to channel presidential policy, the infamously shallow PRM-10 nodded to détente, while legitimizing the fraudulent premise of the old Team B, that 1976 group of right-wing outsiders a Reagan-nervous Ford had commissioned to counter the CIA's non-existent underestimation of Soviet strength.

The conveniently have-it-both-ways Huntington-Brzezinski-Gates document combined "cooperation and competition" into a single U.S. policy toward Russia -- the first half to be honored with pledges of faithfulness by diplomatic day; the second indulged with a serial philanderer's abandon by covert-action night. Among other historic effects, PRM-10 would be the basis for what would develop into Carter's "rapid deployment force" in the Persian Gulf, meant to protect American "access" to Middle Eastern oil, and eventually into a full-fledged Gulf military command, CENTCOM.

It would signal the beginning of what historian Andrew Bacevich has labeled our "oil wars" in the region. More generally, the "report" sanctioned, for a new era, the use of trumped-up "special" panels or consultants to incite political alarm in the body politic whenever militarism -- and especially military spending -- was thought to be in danger of waning.