How will we look back on 2025? Or, if that seems too absurd a question to ponder just a few days into the new year, how might we view the first quarter of the 21st century? As it happens, the answer to both questions is the same and it was confirmed by an event that came as the old year faded and the new one began.
I’m referring to the death of Jimmy Carter. The assessments of the former US president’s life and legacy have illustrated an uncomfortable truth – one that is especially unsettling for journalists, as it happens – but which also offers some unexpected hope.
Here’s what I mean. For years, Carter was a byword for political failure. He was the one-term loser who tried and failed to rescue Americans held hostage in Tehran; whose most famous address, the so-called malaise speech, did not lift the nation’s spirits, but rather plunged them into a pit of despair; who crafted the perfect metaphor for his administration, and indeed for 1970s America, when he took part in a six-mile run and had to quit four miles in, after he was photographed “wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion”, all but collapsing under the strain. That was in September 1979 and he was beaten by Ronald Reagan the following year.
That image of Carter was false or incomplete in multiple ways. For one thing, it missed the fact that he had lived what his biographer, Jonathan Alter, calls an “epic, American life”, emerging from a barefoot childhood in rural Georgia, without electricity or running water, to a naval career that saw him become a Mission: Impossible-style action hero: in 1952, he was lowered into a nuclear reactor at risk of meltdown and given exactly 90 seconds to avert disaster, completing the job with a single second to spare.
More obviously, the branding of Carter as a failure misses the long list of achievements he racked up after his ejection from office, in what was surely the most consequential post-presidency in US history. Whether it was his role in all but eradicating Guinea worm disease – down from 3.5 million cases in 1986, to just 11 last year – building houses for the poor or monitoring elections and promoting democracy, Carter served as a kind of global village elder, still listened to deep into his 90s. As he put it to me when I interviewed him in 2008, “I have moral authority – as long as I don’t destroy it.”
All right, Carter’s critics will say, conceding that who he was before he reached the White House and what he did afterwards were both impressive: that still doesn’t alter the fact that his presidency was a failure. Except there, too, the conventional view gets much wrong, for reasons that offer an important lesson for our own time.
What historians now reflect on is a rather extraordinary record of achievement, both domestic and foreign. At home, Carter passed more major items of legislation in four years than Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or George W Bush managed in eight. Those included several advances in environmental policy that have endured. Carter was not only the first world leader to identify climate change as a problem, he was also the first US president to introduce fuel economy standards, acting against the gas-guzzling cars that were once a motif of American life. He was not content to put solar panels on the roof of the White House – later removed by Reagan – and leave it at that. He also moved to clean up toxic waste and doubled the size of America’s national park system, protecting whole swathes of the natural landscape.
Much of his record abroad has proved equally significant. Perhaps his most famous accomplishment was his hands-on brokering at Camp David of a peace accord between Israel and Egypt, the first treaty between Israel and any of its neighbours which, the signatories agreed, could not have happened without his intense, personal engagement.
It galled Carter that that deal did not address the plight of the Palestinians, and he spent much of his post-presidency trying to complete that unfinished business, not always wisely: his praise of the Hamas leadership as committed to peace did not age well. But his decades-long insistence that there could be no peace without Palestinian self-determination has been bloodily vindicated.
No less enduring was his action on China. True, it was Richard Nixon who opened the door, but it was Carter who walked through it, granting formal recognition to the People’s Republic, thereby forging a US-China relationship that would underpin the global economy for the next 45 years. To say nothing of the arms control agreements Carter signed with the Soviet Union, which kept the lid on a nuclear standoff that could have ended in global catastrophe.
The point is, the Carter presidency was rich in lasting achievement. The problem, as Alter told me, was that much of that accomplishment was “not clear until years later”. The trees Carter planted would not bear fruit until long after he left office. Whether on China or the climate, it took decades for the full significance of his actions to reveal itself. Even the Camp David accords, which won Carter plaudits at the time, demonstrate the point. Most assumed that deal would swiftly collapse, but it has held for close to half a century.
The Carter story highlights a great flaw in our politics and the way we assess it. There are two very different cycles – one electoral, the other we might call historical – but we tend to measure success or failure, at least in the moment, only by the former. Carter lost the 1980 election, so he was called a failure. History moves more slowly, weighing up the long-term consequences of decisions taken in office. It looks at the record in government, not just the scoresheet of politics.
There’s a tough lesson there for journalists, who like to think they are offering a first rough draft of history but need to acknowledge that they – we – often miss what will ultimately matter most. Yet it also prompts an encouraging thought. What might look like failure, or plain disappointment, today could look very different a few years from now.
I’ve written before of my belief that history will be much kinder to Gordon Brown – whose post-premiership is the closest British analogue to Carter’s post-presidency – than his contemporaries were. But the same might be true of those currently slammed by press and public. Keir Starmer’s establishment of a three-year commission on adult social care has been widely pilloried as needless procrastination and, right now, it certainly looks that way. But who knows where it might lead or what it might achieve?
We often have the faintest grasp of the ultimate impact, or even the meaning, of events we live through as they unfold. It is usually only afterwards, even decades later, that we can begin to make a full, let alone fair, judgment. At the time, we see so little. So how will we look back on 2025 or on the first quarter of this century? The answer offered by a man who lived a century-long life in full is, of course, that it’s far, far too early to tell.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
