Jimmy Carter, RIP

The President turned 100 last October.

Jimmy Carter always struck me as an unlucky President. A number of concerning problems piled up during his term, but generally more the result of long-term trends than of Carter’s personal mistakes. And a number of incidents went badly for him that with more luck might have worked, such as the 1980 Iran hostage rescue mission.

And Carter had the misfortune to have to run for re-election against a talented and lucky politician, Ronald Reagan.

Carter also tended to suffer weird human interest incidents made for late night comics, such as being attacked by a giant swimming rabbit. Surprisingly, this really happened. Here’s a wire service photo taken as Carter is fending off with splashes the rabbit that tried to board his little fishing boat. You can see the rabbit swimming away on the right side.

Interestingly, around the pivotal year of 1979, Carter swung toward Reaganism-Lite policies, such as appointing inflation hawk Paul Volcker as Fed chairman, who eventually crushed inflation in the bad 1982 recession. So it’s hard to draw a sharp dividing line between the two eras,

Or, for example, American defense spending had been falling for years while the Soviets boosted their expenses. But in 1979, Carter announced a 3% increase — small change compared to Reagan’s lavish defense spending, but the turning of the tide.

In general, Carter took a harder line against the Soviets as his term progressed: for example, boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas 1979.

Similarly, Carter agreed with NATO partners in 1979 to install NATO intermediate range missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet political initiative of installing in 1977 in Eastern Europe intermediate nuclear missiles that didn’t threaten the U.S. but could be used against Western Europe.

Previously, the Soviets mainly had big intercontinental ballistic missiles that could target either continent, so the US reassured NATO allies that if the Soviets launch, we’ll assume they are launching against America and respond with all out World War III.

This was the logic of US-Soviet Mutual Assured Destruction.

But what if the Soviets built intermediate range missiles to target Western Europe that didn’t threaten the destruction of the United States?

Moscow’s plan was to get Western Europeans thinking hard about whether America would really slug it out with Russia over a Russian attack on Western Europe that didn’t threaten the American homeland. Here’s the complex logic from a Western European politician’s point of view.

Say the Soviets launch a non-nuclear tank invasion through the Fulda Gap into West Germany. But NATO conventional forces hold up pretty well, so the Soviets get desperate and threaten to use nukes. Or we have to use tactical nukes to stop them. In either case, the Kremlin then threatens to nuke Western Europe but not America.

The Americans have been telling us for years, to make Mutual Assured Destruction a credible deterrent, that they’d then do the self-sacrificing thing and fight an all-out end of the world nuclear war for us.

Really?

I mean, us Western Europeans wouldn’t get ourselves blown up in an nuclear apocalypse to defend Americans, would we? Of course not. So how can we trust American assurances that they’d fight an all-out nuclear war with the Russians over us to deter the Russians from starting it? The Americans have been telling us that they’d launch against the Russians for the technical reason that they couldn’t tell if the Russian ICBMs were headed for Western Europe or for American silos in the Dakotas, so America would have to use their ICBMs before they’d lose their ICBMs, which would in any case ensure a Soviet strike on the U.S. homeland.

But now the Russians have built a whole new class of non-intercontinental missiles that are no threat to North America. So, why wouldn’t the President of the United States decide, in the crisis, to sit out this intra-European war and emerge with his giant country intact? But then what happens to the deterrent logic of MAD? And if the Americans might not defend us from our Russian neighbors when push comes to shove, why risk the Soviets blowing us up? Finland doesn’t have it so bad, do they? Get the Kremlin on the line and let’s make a deal.

So in 1979, NATO agreed to counter by installing its own intermediate range missiles so that Western Europe could fight without requiring a launch from North America. The Soviets responded by promoting the giant Nuclear Freeze movement in the United States that peaked in 1982 with huge demonstrations across the West against Ronald Reagan. But the heart of the matter was Carter’s 1979 policy.

Eventually, pro-NATO parties won the big 1983 elections in West Germany, Britain, and Italy and the Nuclear Freeze movement faded away and soon the Soviet Union collapsed.

Would this have played out much differently if Carter had won a second term?

Probably not, although Carter’s personality was less confidence-inducing.

Anyway, it was a difficult time and these kind of nuclear war strategy issues are horrible to think through, so it’s mostly been memory-holed.