How will 2025 turn out? The life of Jimmy Carter offers us a clue Jonathan Freedland

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, but also offer 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 10km run and had to quit 6km in, after he was photographed "wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion". That was in September 1979 and he was beaten in the election 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.