Sincere tributes aside, Jimmy Carter’s legacy still hampers a world Trump must fix

As the tributes roll in before America bids farewell to Jimmy Carter, current global turbulence provides fresh reminders that the decisions the late 39th president made in office continue to impact the world four decades later and present both challenges and opportunities for the man about to assume the White House for a second term.

Many of the issues confronting President-elect Donald Trump – Iran, the Panama Canal, the Education Department and appeasement diplomacy – have their roots in the Carter presidency, a reality that can’t be erased by the significant humanitarian achievements the former president aggregated after he left office or the widely recognized kindness of the God-fearing, Navy-serving peanut farmer who lived to be 100.

“I don't think there's anyone that would say a bad thing about him, personally,” said Nicholas Giordano, a political science professor at Suffolk Community College and a popular podcaster. “He was genuinely a good and decent human being.

“But it shows you that sometimes being good and decent isn't necessarily equating to success as president,” he added. 

Here are a few of the good-guy-bad-policy debates that arose in Carter’s final days on earth as Trump prepares to return to the White House next month.

Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was an engineering marvel that the United States built and paid for in 1914 and that Carter gifted away in a 1977 treaty. That treaty gave Panama full control of the canal as of 1999 after decades of U.S. operation, but it also codified it would remain free and neutral to shipping traffic.

Carter declared at the time the transaction removed “the last remnant of alleged American colonialism.” Critics like Ronald Reagan, however, warned the treaty gave away America’s hard-earned construction genius and would one day place the western world in a security lurch over one of the most important marine passageways in the world.

"The canal is ours, we bought and we paid for it and we should keep it," the late Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond said at the time.

China and Panama

Those security concerns are coming into clearer focus today as communist China’s companies have won bids in the last decade for several major infrastructure projects like power plants, a bridge and canal locks near the site.

To show his newfound influence in Panama, President Xi also made a state visit to Panama in 2018 after the Latin American country joined Beijing’s "Belt and Road" initiative.

Today, Panamanian exports to China dwarf those to the United States and imports from Beijing have caught up to those from America, a tilt in economic allegiance that is nearly as concerning to members of Congress as the growth of the Chinese presence around the famed canal.

“A visitor to the Panama Canal might think they were in China. Ports at both ends of the Canal are managed by companies from the People's Republic of China (PRC), while Huawei dominates the country's telecoms system,” then-Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., wrote in a Newsweek Op/Ed a year ago as part of his leadership of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

“Panama illustrates the relentless advance of CCP influence across the Western Hemisphere,” he added. “…. The real prize is control—not only control of strategic points such as the Panama Canal and ports but of natural resources, telecommunications, and ultimately governments.”

Trump began raising such concerns in 2019 and he catapulted the issue to the front of public consciousness over the Christmas holiday with a bold declaration.

If Panama doesn’t begin lowering shipping rates for passage through the canal, "we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Liberals and Panamanians scoffed at such a notion. But Trump’s declaration seized public fascination, prompting a debate unlike anything since Carter first touched off a firestorm with the treaty. Even left-leaning National Public Radio had to admit “it feels like 1976 all over again.”

Wherever Trump’s quest on the canal ends, the debate was just one reminder in Carter’s final days that his decisions five decades ago continue to raise concern today.

The Iranian Revolution and Hostage Crisis

It is ironic that Carter’s greatest foreign success and his worst failure both occurred in the turbulent Middle East.

The 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt and landed Carter a Nobel Prize reshaped the region’s dynamic, and eventually led to future successes like Trump’s Abraham Accords in 2020 that widened the partnerships between Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors.

But the progress toward peace afforded by the accords was countered by the Carter administration’s hesitant response to an Iranian crisis in 1978-79. That crisis began with signs that the ruling monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was in danger of being ousted by religious Shia Islamist zealots and ended with the fall of the country to an anti-U.S. regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the capture of 444 American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran,

The hostage crisis felled Carter’s presidency and paved the way for Reagan’s 1980 victory. But it also exposed Carter for his hesitancy and indecision on the world stage as well as a propensity to try to win over adversaries through appeasement, something that Democrat successors Barack Obama and Joe Biden also adapted.

Documents released years later show Carter was explicitly warned in fall 1978 by his ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, that the Shah was in danger of falling and that a failure of the United States to find a moderate replacement might lead to an extremist, anti-American regime.

“The authority of the Shah has considerably shrunk,” Sullivan wrote in a November 9, 1978, cable. “His support among the general public has become almost invisible these days.”

Iran falls to theocracy

“Our current approach of trusting that the Shah together with the military will be able to face down the Khomeini threat is obviously the only safe course to pursue at this juncture,” the ambassador wrote. “However if it should fail and if the Shah should abdicate we need to think the unthinkable at this time in order to give our thoughts some precision should the unthinkable contingency arise.”

You can read that full cable here.

Carter didn’t aggressively seek to replace the Shah, and Iran fell to the theocracy of Khomeini-led mullahs, leaving America and Western allies subject to decades of terrorist attacks ranging from Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s to the current horrors of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel or the Houthi attacks on American ships in the Red Sea this year.

“You have to deal with a lot of vicious people on the international world stage, and that indecisiveness was what crippled his administration, particularly when it came to the Iranian hostage crisis,” Giordano told Just the News on Monday.

Carter was viewed as similarly passive when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, touching off a mujahadeen war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and the eventual Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

U.S. Education Department

Carter’s decision to create the Department of Education as a new Cabinet-level agency in 1979 – with the help of a Democrat-run Congress – came despite a belief among conservatives and libertarians that it violated the Constitution.

The Constitution never explicitly authorized the federal government to oversee education, and the 10th Amendment declared that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

For four decades, conservatives starting with Reagan expressed hope they could one day rescind the department. But for most of that time it was a pipe dream. But in 2024, Trump declared he would eliminate the agency that Carter created from whole cloth and many members of Congress have rallied behind the notion, giving fresh momentum to the movement.

Part of the impetus came from the return-on-investment analysis. Since its inception, the Education Department has spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and yet student performance has mostly stagnated.

Reading scores in 2023 were the same as they were in the 1970s, and math scores were only slightly higher, according to the government’s own data. And the agency proved unable to stop a precipitous slide in student performance brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdown.

The Biden department’s advocacy for far-left ideologies like DEI and allowing transgender men in women’s sports also disillusioned many Americans, adding fresh public support for a smaller, if not eliminated agency.

While the statistics show student performance has stagnated, many feel the overall state of education has declined.

“All of these things have gotten worse since we created a Federal Department of Education,” Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told Just the News on Monday.

“We've allowed the left to win this argument for too long: give more power to bureaucrats, give more power to government, and our kids will magically get smarter. Well, that's just not true,” he added. “As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. The more that you give power to the government, the less power families have.”

History's Final Verdict

When the nation mourns Carter at his Jan. 9 State Funeral in Washington, D.C., he will accurately be remembered for his kindness, his faith, his service to country and the humanitarian achievements of his years out of office.

But his successor as the 47th president will also be face global and national challenges that were also of Carter’s making, and history will ultimately write the final chapter on how those turned out.

“Look, he was a statesman,” Walters said of Carter. “His impact, especially after coming out of the White House, was tremendous. You know, a guy that really gave a tremendous amount from him and his family to his fellow man. But listen, I. I think when you study history, we've got to be up front with our kids. 

“It doesn't matter if you're Republican, Democrat, what your background is. We've got to go in and say, here's what happened while this person was president. Here were their policies. Here was the impact,” he added.