1 gen 1977 anni - Carter presidency begins

Descrizione:

hostage crisis:Crisis in 1979, in which Iranian college students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage, and demanded that the deposed Shah, an undemocratic ruler installed with American backing in 1954, be returned to face trial in Iran. President Carter refused, and the hostages were kept for 444 days.

First, the Republican Party had to defeat incumbent president Jimmy Carter. Carter’s outsider status and disdain for professional politicians had made him the ideal post-Watergate presidential candidate. But his ineffectiveness as an executive also made him the perfect foil for Ronald Reagan.

In foreign affairs, the idealistic Carter presented himself as the anti-Nixon, a world leader who rejected Henry Kissinger’s “realism” in favor of human rights and peacemaking. “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy,” Carter asserted, “because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.” He established the Bureau of Human Rights in the State Department and withdrew economic and military aid from repressive regimes in Argentina, Uruguay, and Ethiopia — although, in a concession to American strategic interests, he still funded authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, South Africa, and Iran. In Latin America, Carter removed a long-standing symbol of Yankee imperialism with a 1977 treaty handing over control of the Panama Canal to Panama — although not until December 31, 1999, as the treaty specified. Carter’s most important efforts came in forging an enduring, if limited, peace in the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1978, he invited Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat to Camp David, where they crafted a “framework for peace,” under which Egypt recognized Israel and regained the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied since 1967.

Carter deplored what he called the “inordinate fear of communism,” but his efforts at improving relations with the Soviet Union foundered. His criticism of the Kremlin’s record on human rights offended Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and slowed arms reduction negotiations that had been underway since 1974. In 1979, Carter finally signed the second Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT II), limiting bombers and missiles — but Senate hawks stalled the treaty. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan that December, Carter suddenly sided with the hawks and denounced the invasion as the “gravest threat to world peace since World War II.” After ordering an embargo on wheat shipments to the Soviet Union and withdrawing SALT II from Senate consideration, Carter called for increased defense spending and declared an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In a fateful decision, the United States began to send covert assistance to anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, some of whom, including Osama bin Laden, would emerge decades later as anti-American Islamic radicals.


Carter’s ultimate undoing came in Iran, however. The United States had long relied on Iran as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into the Middle East and a steady source of oil. The country’s shah (king) had been ousted by a democratically elected parliament in 1953, but reclaimed power in a matter of days with the support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. This intervention soured Iranian views of the United States, which was regarded as an imperial nation that had violated Iranian sovereignty. Early in 1979, a revolution drove the shah into exile and brought a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to power. After the United States admitted the deposed shah into the country for cancer treatment, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage. The captors demanded that the shah be returned to Iran for trial. Carter refused. Instead, he suspended arms sales to Iran and froze Iranian assets in American banks.

Images of blindfolded, handcuffed American hostages seized by Iranian militants at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 shocked the nation and created a foreign policy crisis that eventually cost President Carter his chance for reelection.

For the next fourteen months, the hostage crisis paralyzed Carter’s presidency. Night after night, humiliating pictures of blindfolded American hostages appeared on television newscasts. An attempted military rescue in April 1980 had to be aborted because of equipment failures in the desert. Several months later, however, a stunning development scrambled the situation: Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, officially because of a dispute over deep-water ports but also to prevent Iran’s Shiite-led revolution from spreading across the border into Iraq, which was run by Sunni Muslims. Needing to focus his country on the war with Iraq, Khomeini opened hostage-release talks with the United States. Difficult negotiations dragged on past the American presidential election in November 1980, and the hostages were finally released the day after Carter left office — a final indignity to a well-intentioned but unsuccessful president.

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