The Carter Doctrine and the US role in the Middle East
The Carter Doctrine isn't much mentioned today. But it represented a major step toward the involvements the US has more recently undertaken in the Greater Middle East, including Afghanistan.
Nikolas Gvosdev discusses it a 2020 piece:
Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter made a commitment that the United States would guarantee the free flow of energy from the Persian Gulf region to the rest of the world. In his State of the Union address [01/23/1980], he declared that instability in the region “demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened. Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region. Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” His successor as president, Ronald Reagan, issued a “corollary” to the so-called Carter Doctrine in October 1981, whereby the internal stability of the governments of the region, as well as defending them from external attack, became a prime national interest of the United States.
George McGovern addressed the Carter Doctrine a few months after it was promulgated.
The title of his article, “How to Avert a New 'Cold War'“ is a reminder that while today the Cold War is conventionally dated from 1945-1948 to 1989, in the 1970s it was common to refer to the post-1972 period in US-Soviet relations as a post-Cold War “detente”.Global Security's current entry on “Cold War” reads:
By one reckoning, the Cold War began in the 1945-1948 timeframe, and ended in 1989, having been a dispute over the division of Europe. By another account, the Cold War began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, having been a conflict between Bolshevism and Democracy.
The latter definition is a quirky and ideological (i.e., hard right) one. Even devout Cold Warriors in the post-World War II world rarely referred to “Bolshevism” in that context. And as the article proceeds to recount, the term “Cold War” wasn’t even used until after the Second World War.
The term "Cold War" was first used in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, senior advisor to Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, in reference to the frequently occurring and exacerbating crises between the United States and the former Soviet Union, despite having fought side-by-side against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
The ultra-respectable Britannica Online expands on the origin of the term:
The term was first used by the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” It was first used in the United States by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947.
Britannica leans toward the later beginning date: "The Cold War had solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe." (my emphasis) It also uses 1991 as the end date, but focus on the ebbs and flows of its intensity:
The 1970s saw an easing of Cold War tensions as evinced in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that led to the SALT I and II agreements of 1972 and 1979, respectively, in which the two superpowers set limits on their antiballistic missiles and on their strategic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. That was followed by a period of renewed Cold War tensions in the early 1980s as the two superpowers continued their massive arms buildup and competed for influence in the Third World. But the Cold War began to break down in the late 1980s during the administration of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. …
In late 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and 15 newly independent nations were born from its corpse, including a Russia with a democratically elected, anticommunist leader. The Cold War had come to an end.
It was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 that presented the opportunity to announce the Carter Doctrine.
Given my admiration for Carter's post-Presidential career and his important and substantive contributions to world peace, I'm almost tempted to apologize for discussing the problematic nature of his signature foreign policy doctrine as President. That was also commonly described as the end of “detente.”
But the reality is, in practice the Carter Doctrine became an unnecessary surrender to the hawks in his administration led by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. And we now know that it had some grim implications. Not the least of them was the contribution that the US support for the “mujahadeen” Islamic fighters opposing the pro-Soviet government played in generating the brand of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism with which we have more recently become familiar. Osama bin Laden got his start as a jihadist in Afghanistan.
Jim Lobe, a National Security Council staffer at the time, writes that he "conceived the Carter Doctrine and, except for the 'action clause' ... added by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, I wrote virtually all the State of the Union Address" that announced it.
Consider the circumstances in January 1980. To Western surprise, the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. It had forces capable of pushing into Iran, perhaps all the way to the Persian Gulf. Iran was in the throes of a revolution. The United States seemed paralyzed regarding what to do about the U.S. hostages held by the new Iranian government under Ayatollah Khomeini. Thus, the Carter Doctrine had only one purpose, other than to state the obvious (that the flow of oil was important): to deter the Soviet Union.
McGovern argued in 1980 - very plausibly - that the Carter Administration had overrated the nature of the kind of Soviet threat the Afghanistan intervention represented. And he explained his concern that the Carter Doctrine played to the advantage of Cold War hardliners:
To all these possible factors--local, regional, and internal to the Soviet Union--the Carter Administration was indifferent, caught up as it was in the excitement of unveiling its new doctrine. It was almost as if, when the Soviets moved into Afghanistan, we were relieved to find ourselves freed from the complexities of Third World nationalism and the Islamic revival and back on the comfortably familiar turf of a bipolar Cold War world. Once they heard the call of the Carter Doctrine, the Iranians would naturally forget about the shah, the Arabs would forget their differences with Israel, our allies in Western Europe and Japan would gratefully follow our lead, and all would join with us in a grand alliance against Soviet aggression. Now the unwelcome "lesson of Vietnam"-- as Daniel Yergin put it, "that 'fundamental designs' may be illusory and that global implications may be secondary to local issues"-- could also be cast aside. Americans could be patriots again, without bothering to make the troublesome distinction between patriotism and jingoism.
In this altered environment our "hawks" joyfully trumpet the coming of the "second Cold War." They are also proclaiming their own vindication: have they not warned us all along that detente would fail? ey have indeed, but the question remains whether they merely foresaw the breakdown, or helped to contrive it.
McGovern made a point of the kind I dearly wish we heard more often from Democratic leaders today:
Preventing nuclear war has become a national interest second to no other, as well as an interest we share with the Soviet Union and with all other nations. It cannot be too often emphasized that a third world war would in no sense be comparable with the ërst and second world wars, which, destructive though they were, left the world physically intact. Although projections differ as to which side might emerge from a nuclear war with the larger fraction of its industry intact and of its people still alive, no one contests that the losses would be in the hundreds of millions and that our society and economy, even were we to emerge as the "winner" of the conflict, would be grievously crippled. [my emphasis]
McGovern's long essay covers a lot of other ground relating to the Cold War. It's an impressive piece, one showing that there were alternative contemporary possibilities that could have steered developments in a very different direction.
One comment he made in this article is the one that most stuck with me for 40 years: "In the last resort we must be prepared to use military force to assist friendly governments in the [Persian Gulf] region against external or internal threats." (my emphasis) McGovern was well aware of the ugly imperatives imposed on US foreign policy by the country's (then) direct dependence on foreign oil. In 2020, that direct dependence has disappeared. And yet our last President was babbling about seizing Middle East oil.
McGovern made it clear what kind of solution to the dilemma of that time he preferred: "Strengthening our capacity to defend the Arabian peninsula, coupled with an effective and convincing energy program at home, is the real 'message' we need to send to the Soviets, and for that matter to OPEC and the rest of the world."
Lobe argues on the later development of the Carter Doctrine:
Only later did the Carter Doctrine get morphed into something broader, at least in the view of promoters of a wider set of engagements in the region. This wider set of engagements included, but was not limited to, protecting the flow of oil - the long-standing implicit U.S. interest. Indeed, protecting oil shipments in the Persian Gulf has, along with the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security, been an “evergreen” Middle Eastern interest of all U.S. administrations since the late 1940s, when Britain and France withdrew from the region.
What I have written here may sound Jesuitical, but it is not. It shows that the United States in 1980 was responding to the circumstances of the time - a palpable Soviet military and geopolitical threat - which circumstances collapsed with the end of the Cold War. The evergreen U.S. interests have continued, but without the overarching geopolitical implication - namely, that if the U.S. does not act, a major external competitor for power will fill the vacuum. [my emphasis]
Gvosdev, Nikolas (2020): The Carter Doctrine Conundrum: Has Trump Repudiated a Foundational Element of U.S. National Security Strategy? The National Interest 01/10/2020. <https://nationalinterest.org/feature/carter-doctrine-conundrum-has-trump-repudiated-foundational-element-us-national-security> (Accessed: 2023-20-03).
McGovern, George (1980): How to Avert a New 'Cold War'. The Atlantic June 1980, 45-57. <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1980/06/how-avert-new-cold-war/309181/> (Accessed: 2022-10-10).
Cold War. GlobalSecurity.org n/d. <https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/cold_war.htm> (Accessed: 2023-20-03).
Ibid.
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2023): Cold War. Britannica Online 03/01/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Cold-War> (Accessed: 2023-20-03).
Lobe, Jim (2019): The Persian Gulf Crisis: Beyond The Carter Doctrine. LobeLog 09/23/2019. <https://lobelog.com/the-persian-gulf-crisis-beyond-the-carter-doctrine/> (Accessed: 2023-20-03).
Tim Wyatt, Tim (2020): 'Maybe we will, maybe we won't’: Trump doubles down on threat to take oil from Syria. Independent 01/11/2020. <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-syria-oil-war-crime-isis-assad-fox-news-a9279381.html> (Accessed: 2023-20-03).