The former president and peace campaigner highlights the costs to the U.S. and the world of a focus on arms. Excerpt from “President Jimmy Carter: Challenges of a Superpower,” February 24, 2013.

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER, Former U.S. President; Founder, The Carter Center; Recipient, Nobel Peace Prize

 

The American heritage is that at times of challenge we have historically risen to greatness. We realize that in a democracy like ours, that change from challenge to greatness is a matter of responsibility for individual citizens, and that’s what I am: just a private citizen like you.

What are the goals of a great nation? I would say they’re the same as the goals of a great person. They’re the goals that have been established most clearly in the religions that we might adopt as our own – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and so forth – and they’re all the same. There’s really no incompatibility between a desire on the part of a human being to be a superb human being in the eyes of whatever god we worship and [a desire] for a nation to say, I want to be a superb nation; I want to be a genuine superpower in all the meanings of the word.

So what are those characteristics? I would say it would be a commitment to peace, a commitment to justice, a commitment to freedom and democracy, a commitment to human rights, to protecting the environment that we’ve inherited, to sharing our wealth with others. I think those are the hallmarks of a superpower.

Let’s look at America for a moment. Let’s talk about peace first of all. Since World War II we’ve been almost constantly at war – in Korea, in Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, Afghanistan. I don’t know about the future. Iran? Syria? Mali?

You get the point. Our country is now looked upon as the foremost warlike nation on earth, and there is almost a complete dearth now of commitment of America to negotiate differences with others. It’s not just Democrats or Republicans or a particular president; it’s a consciousness or attitude of Americans like you and me.

I’m not a pacifist. My career was as a naval officer. When I was six years old, all I wanted to do was to be a naval officer. I [later] went to Annapolis, and I served on two battleships and three submarines. I was willing to give my life if necessary to protect the interests of my country. As a matter of fact, since the Civil War era, the only president who had more military service than I have was Eisenhower. I’m not against protecting us; I believe in a strong defense and I worked for that when I was president.

But we need to be working for peace for others as well as ourselves. The Mideast has a typical need for peace. This is the first time in more than 50 years that the United States has not been trying to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors.

Let’s look at human rights. America was a nation that was the foremost committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was passed with Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership when the United Nations was first formed. Many times during the interim period, we’ve been the champion of human rights. That’s no longer the case.

Look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on your computer and you’ll find 30 paragraphs. Our staff at the Carter Center has determined that we’re now violating 10 of those 30 paragraphs. We’ve now disavowed the application of the Geneva controls on treatment of prisoners at war. And you know there’s been a lot of altercation back and forth lately about the use of drones to assassinate Americans within foreign countries and not excluding in the United States. We have 166 people at Guantanamo now. Half of them have never been tried at all; they’ve never been accused of a crime. All of them at Guantanamo are faced with the prospect of serving the rest of their lives in prison. Our president has announced that we have the right to send people to prison for life without a trial, without legal counsel and without any specific charge against them. This is a policy toward human rights that is usually accepted, especially since 9/11, when the restraints on human rights and commitments to human rights were very firm and unequivocal in the United States.

We’re the only industrialized nation on earth that still has a death penalty. In fact, 90 percent of all the executions in the world are in four countries: Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and the United States. We have the highest prison population, by far, in the world. When I left office in 1980, we had a very low prison population; for every one person in prison then, we now have seven and a half in prison. Almost all of the people in prison are poor or minorities or mentally retarded. The largest mental institution in the United States is the prison in Los Angeles.

Let’s look at justice or equity. Since I left office in 1980, the income for the top 1 percent of Americans has doubled, and the income for the top one-hundredth of a percent has quintupled, because of our political system permitting the more powerful people, the richer people, to prevail in changing income tax laws and so forth. High school [graduation] rates in America stopped climbing last year for the first time since 1890. And the portion of family income for tuition in either public or private institutions has increased from 4 percent of average income to 10 percent of a family’s income. Americans in poverty have increased 31 percent just in the last five years.

You know the state of our democratic process now. When I ran for office as a governor against incumbent Gerald Ford, for the general election, do you know how much money we raised? Zero. When I ran four years later against Governor Ronald Reagan, we raised zero. We just used a two-dollar per person check-off [on the federal income tax system]. Now there’s a massive infusion of money into the primary and general election system, unrestricted by the stupid decision of a U.S. Supreme Court. [Applause] Most of that money is spent on negative commercials to destroy the reputation of your opponent, and that has divided Americans into red and blue states. It also has divided candidates against one another so that when they finally get to Washington, there is no compatibility detectable now between Democratic and Republican senators or members of Congress or between a House that’s Republican and a Democratic president. The blame is both ways. We haven’t had a federal budget now in five years. About 40 percent of everything we spend in the federal government now has to be borrowed, and there’s no concerted effort to address the roughly trillion-dollar deficit each year.

[Let’s look at] the environment. Up until [the presidency of] George Bush Sr., America was in the forefront of nations on earth promoting a good environment and dealing with global warming. We’re now one of the laggard countries. The Europeans and many others are moving ahead of us.

Well, I’m not criticizing my country, which I think is the best nation on earth, and I’m very proud to have served as its leader; but I’m pointing out that in this time of assessment, particularly for my 23 children and grandchildren, and for the students that I’ve taught now for 31 years and for other young people, at least we need to look at what are the possibilities for improving.

[The Carter Center] deals with these same principles that I just outlined. We try to go to countries and promote peace [in places] the United States is alienated from. We go to Cuba regularly; we go to North Korea regularly; we have full-time offices in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and also in Gaza City.

We try to promote freedom and democracy when countries are facing a challenge in their government. We just finished our 93rd troubled election in Sierra Leone. As the Arab Spring, or Arab Awakening, took place, the Carter Center has been there. We’ve been in Egypt for two years as Egypt struggles to form a new government.

We also work on health care and on sharing what we have with poor people. One of the basic principles of the Carter Center is to fill vacuums in the world. Our budget, which started out just trying to promote peace between countries, shifted toward treating five neglected tropical diseases. One of these is a disease called river blindness. I just came back from Mexico this week, because we have almost completely eliminated river blindness from Latin American countries.

So this is the kind of thing that a small NGO will do. I didn’t come here to brag about what we’re doing, but I came to point out that these apparently intransigent problems that our country faces, that every individual faces, that I face, are not insoluble if we set our goals high and are determined to work in harmony with each other, no matter what our social status or our political affiliation may be.

I believe that all of us would agree that the United States of America should be a champion of peace. We should be a champion of justice. We should be a champion of human rights. We should be a champion of the environment. We should be a champion of alleviating suffering among other people on earth. This is what I think are the challenges of a superpower.

 

Question and answer session with Skip Rhodes, Member, The Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

RHODES: How do the Iranian and North Korean nuclear situations [compare]?

CARTER: There’s a very close parallelism between Iran and North Korea. I’ve been going to North Korea quite regularly since 1994, when we were on the verge of a war between North and South Korea; and I went over and negotiated with Kim il Sung and then president Clinton followed up and had an agreement in all issues, including no nuclear program in North Korea; that was consummated in Geneva a little bit later on.

Unfortunately, when George W. Bush became president, he threw that agreement in the waste basket. At that time North Korea, which is very paranoid and very isolated and very dominated by dictatorship, decided that they would go all out to defend themselves by creating nuclear capability. Now they probably have the capability of five or six plutonium bombs – they just exploded another one this month. We don’t know if it was purified uranium, which takes a lot longer, or just the plutonium made out of spent fuel. I think that the North Koreans are going to have enough judgment not to be suicidal. They know if they ever use a nuclear weapon against South Korea or anywhere else, that the United States will wipe them off the map.

The same thing exists in Iran. My hope is that we can prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon – and I’m not sure at this point, and no one else is either, that Iran’s leaders have decided to go with a nuclear bomb capability. But even if Iran should develop two or three nuclear weapons, then they know that if they should challenge Israel, for instance, with one of their nuclear weapons, Israel has [about] 200 nuclear weapons of a very advanced nature. I’m not sure the Iranians are suicidal enough to want to have their own country wiped off the map by challenging Israel. So my own preference is that we negotiate with Iran and negotiate with North Korea as well.

RHODES: What prevents real progress in the Israel-Arab conflict? And why does the United States have no clout when it comes to influencing Israeli settlement policies?

CARTER: This is the first time since Israel has been a nation that the United States has, you might say, zero influence in Jerusalem or among the Palestinians. I’m very aggrieved about that and hope that this upcoming visit by John Kerry, the secretary of state, to Israel, followed up by the first visit of President Obama to Israel, will be meaningful.

After he was first elected president, President Obama went to Cairo and called for zero increase in Israeli settlements in Palestine, and later he also [stated] that the ’67 borders around Israel, modified by good-faith talks, would be the prevailing premise for peace. That is generally called a two-state solution, with Israel living within its borders, modified slightly, and with the Palestinians living within their borders in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, side by side with mutual respect and in peace. That’s what everybody hopes for.

My own belief is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, for the first time, has decided on a one-state solution, because under his administration Israel had been madly building settlements in East Jerusalem and also on the West Bank – nobody wants Gaza – and this means that it’s becoming decreasingly likely that you could have a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel.

I’m very discouraged about that, and the only thing that can be done about it is for the United States to play a major role. If President Obama will go back to the two premises that he had earlier – no more Israeli settlements in Palestine, and the ’67 borders would prevail between the two, modified to accommodate the large settlements right outside of Jerusalem – then that would be the best solution.

I think the Arab world will accept this. On two or three occasions, already, every Arab country – and every Muslim country – even including Iran, has agreed that that is a premise that they will accept and that they will recognize Israel as equal to older Arab countries with trade, commerce and diplomatic relations. But so far that has not been possible, and I don’t think the Israelis are going to do it unless the United States plays a very strong role.

RHODES: With the help of the Carter Center and the passage of time, much has improved abroad. What can the Carter Center do to improve U.S. policies here in the United States?

CARTER: The Carter Center takes an idealistic, you might want to call it naïve, approach to human rights. We have come out publicly against the unlimited use of drones to assassinate people without trial and without any judicial oversight. We faced the same basic problem when I was president and we passed what’s called FISA, which established a group of senior judges who could act very expeditiously if the CIA or any other intelligence agency wanted to tap your telephone. If the executive branch wanted to tap your telephone, they had to go to this FISA court, who would then decide yes or no.

I think that’s something that President Obama might want to decide in the future is either a blue ribbon commission – maybe not having to be judges, that is in a judicial system, but having some way to monitor to make sure this is not abused, because we’ve now killed four Americans overseas. One of them was a member of al-Qaeda. He wasn’t threatening immediate attacks on the United States, but long-term [attacks]. His 16-year-old son was also killed and two other Americans. I would like to see some very tight restraints that America’s private citizens – like you and me – and Congress could understand; this is a procedure that’s being used, and if an American is assassinated by a drone, that has been the control of it.

We are very much against the death penalty. As a matter of principle I would like to see the death penalty eliminated. As a matter of fact, when I happened to be governor and happened to be president, nobody was executed, because the Supreme Court at that time had put a hold on all capital punishment [executions]. I wrote an op-ed piece that was in the Los Angeles Times when you were getting ready to vote recently on whether or not California would continue with the death penalty. I was against it. You voted to keep it. One of the things I pointed out was that you have executed 13 people in the last 15 or 20 years. The average cost per person executed by California has been $307 million. That’s how much you spend every time you execute a person.

My own belief is that the threat of the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime.

The Carter Center works with human rights organizations all over the world. We work with Amnesty International, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the whole gamut of them. Every year we have what we call a Defenders Conference, where we bring in human rights defenders, to the Carter Center to consider a key issue. The issue will be women’s rights. We’re going to Cairo, Egypt. It will be in June. And we’ll have human rights heroes come from 45 countries, plus religious leaders who will come to Cairo to meet with us. We’ve got support, not just from President Morsi, but also the Grand Imam of al-Azhar. Al-Azhar is the university in Cairo that has 120,000 students. He’s the president of the university. He’s also the number one Sunni Muslim on Earth. He’s the one that gives the philosophy or the interpretation of the scriptures for the Sunni Muslims. He’s helping us with our conference, because he wants to see religion stop being a cause of abuse of women.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the case. I was a Southern Baptist until 2000 when my wife and I withdrew in protest when the Southern Baptists derogated women to subordinate positions. A woman now in the Southern Baptist convention, for instance, can’t be a preacher, she can’t be a deacon; if she’s in a Southern Baptist seminary, she can’t even teach male students. As you know, the Catholic Church does not let women be priests. The Islamic world also derogates women in some cases. In Saudi Arabia a woman can’t drive a car. When men are inclined to abuse women, the best excuse they can make is, “If God doesn’t consider woman to be equal to man, why should I treat my wife as my equal? Why should I treat my women employees as equal to a male employee if God thinks that women are inferior?”

RHODES: Mr. President, you recently met with the new Chinese leader. This questioner wants to know your impression of him and which direction he will lead China to and can you tell us how you look at the relationship between the U.S. and China, especially from the economy and human rights perspectives.

CARTER: I first visited China in 1949. I was on a submarine and this was the last few weeks before the nationalist Chinese left the mainland and the communists took over. I’ve had a very high interest in China ever since. When I became president, we had been alienated 35 years from China and our diplomatic relationship was only with Taiwan. I decided I would normalize relations with China. We were able to do that, and it was announced the 15th day of December 1978. It took effect the first day of 1979.

Since then I’ve gone to China quite often. The Chinese government trusts me and the Carter Center in an extraordinary way. For instance, they have authorized the Carter Center with a contract with the government to monitor all the 650,000 villages in China and they’re purely democratic elections. Everybody in those little villages is automatically registered to vote when they reach the age of 18. They have a secret ballot. The candidates can run for office whether they are communist or not, and most of them are not members of the Communist Party. They can run for re-election after three years and that sort of thing. The Carter Center has monitored that for 15 years.

We’re also helping the Chinese now with their relationship with African countries, and we’re also helping the Chinese implement a freedom-of-information law to let the people of China know what their government is doing. The Chinese government, by the way, calls on us to do this. Xi Jinping has been a friend of mine for many years. I’ve met four different times with Xi Jinping since I knew he was going to be the next leader of China. He will be ordained next month when the national people’s conference convenes. I’ve also met with Li Keqiang, who will be the vice premier of China beginning next month, so I know the Chinese leaders very well.

When I was there in December, they were very deeply concerned about the attitude of the United States toward them, with the new move by President Obama to the Pacific, and with the stationing of 2,500 Marines in Australia and things like that. Also, they had a windmill project in Oregon, and President Obama declared that the windmill project of China would be a threat to our security. Some of the rhetoric you heard from Governor Romney and also, to a lesser degree, from President Obama in the last election, the Chinese monitor every one of those words and they try to interpret what these candidates mean and their attitude toward China. China is very concerned about the attitude of America toward them in the future. I think we’re competitive in many ways. The Chinese are very influential in all of Africa, all of Latin America, I think forming contracts for politics and for economic benefit.

I think in the future China wants to stay peaceful. I mentioned a list of wars we’ve been in since World War II a while ago. It’s a long list, and I didn’t name them all.

When I normalized relationships with Deng Xiaoping, the next morning when he met with me he said he had a secret message that he had to give me, that China was going to invade Vietnam. I said, “Don’t do it, because you and I just formed a peace agreement for the first time, and the first thing you do is invade another country. It shows that you’re not peaceful.” Then he said, “We’ll be there just to punish Vietnam, because we have to do that as a matter of honor.” I said, “If you will, do me a favor: Don’t stay very long.” And he said, “OK.” So they were only in Vietnam for two weeks, and then they withdrew. That was in 1979. The Chinese have not been at war since 1979. They’re worried about this.

I think the best way for us to compete with China and win, if we want to have a victor or a loser, is for us to adhere to the principles of peace and justice and democracy and freedom and environment and that sort of thing. That’s what I think we should do to compete with them successfully. There is no way that China is ever going to threaten the United States militarily. I don’t think they’re ever going to threaten the United States politically either, unless they change and make the democracy that exists in little villages prevail in their big cities and counties and provinces. The little villages are not part of the Communist Party system. They are completely separate. The Communist Party starts at what they call townships, which is big cities, and then goes to counties and provinces. I think eventually China is going to continue to move more toward democracy. I hope that Xi Jinping will bring that about.

There has been a setback recently under Hu Jintao, but I believe that in the future we’re going to see more freedom go to China. When I normalized diplomatic relations with China they had no freedom of religion; it was against the law to own a Bible. Now the largest Bible-producing company on Earth is in China, and the fastest growing Christian country on Earth is China.

RHODES: There has been a bit of controversy relating to the movie Argo over the role played by Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor and his embassy staff versus that played by the CIA in shepherding six CIA agents to freedom during the ’79 hostage crisis. Can you shed some light on these events? Are there any events that weren’t captured in the movie that you could share with us?

CARTER: I was president when the hostages were taken in Iran, as most of you old enough would remember. I was informed immediately that six of our hostages were not taken in the compound by the Iranians. They escaped, they went to two or three other places; for instance, the British and some others wouldn’t take them in, so they finally ended up in the Canadian embassy in the (deputy chief of mission’s) office, where they were taken in.

The Canadians were in great potential trouble then, because all of their diplomats could also have been taken hostage if they had been caught protecting Americans. Ken Taylor was the ambassador there, and Flora MacDonald was the foreign minister for Canada. I was faced with a very difficult position, too, because I wanted to keep it absolutely secret. I finally worked out an agreement between the CIA and the Canadians that the American hostages would escape using Canadian passports. But you can imagine the difficulty, legally speaking, for the Canadian parliament to issue false passports. The entire parliament had to go into secret session, the only time they’ve ever done that in history, and they did. They voted to issue the six false passports and they kept it secret. The false passports went over there and the hostages were permitted to leave.

The movie role played by the American hero, he was only there a day and a half; Ken Taylor and them were there through the whole thing. When the Americans escaped, contrary to the very vivid end of the movie, which brought me to the edge of my seat as well when I watched it, where this pickup truck outran a jet airplane taking off – I’m not criticizing Hollywood, but nobody ever knew that the six Americans had been in the Canadian embassy until they were safe in Switzerland.

My judgment is that 90 percent of the credit for that heroic and brilliant move should have been with the Canadians. The movie ignores practically any contribution by the Canadians. Aside from that, it’s a vivid, wonderful film. Not precisely factual, but I hope it gets the Best Picture Award. [Editor’s note: Argo did win the Best Picture Academy Award just hours after Carter spoke to The Commonwealth Club.]

On a different basis, we had CIA agents going into Iran fairly often. At one time four CIA agents went in, and there was a very close relationship between Iran and Germany. Most of the Iranian leaders were educated in Germany, so we ordinarily used German passports. [One time,] these four Americans were leaving Iran and went through Customs. As they went through, one of them showed [the agent] his passport. He said, “OK, go ahead.” He walked about 20 feet and then the customs agent said, “Wait, come back. I’ve been a customs agent here for 20 years. I’ve never before seen a German passport with an initial on it. They always spell out the full name. Here your name is ‘Ira H. Schuchter.’” He said, “I don’t understand it.” So the CIA agent thought very rapidly and he said, “I have to confess. When I was born, my parents gave me the middle name of ‘Hitler.’ I have special permission to use the initial.” So he said, “Go on through.”

That hasn’t been told publicly, by the way.