The Untold Story of Jimmy Carter's Hawkish Stand on Iran

The late president was criticized as too passive in engaging anew U.S. enemy. But his attempted interventions were forceful—just misguided.

T he popular impression for the four decades since his presidency is that Jimmy Carter, who died this week, is responsible for somehow "losing" Iran. His passivity, it has often been argued, helped build the militant Islamist state that has stalked the Middle East since Iran's revolution in 1979.

But if that is seen as his most meaningful legacy, the archives of the time tell a different story. No American tried harder to thwart the revolution than Carter. And when that failed, he plotted to subvert the Islamic regime.

The mid-1970s, when Carter took office, was a time of U.S. retrenchment. The twin shocks of Watergate and Vietnam had caused many Americans to lose confidence in their politicians and institutions.

The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 was followed by an oil embargo and dramatic spike in petroleum prices; those in turn pushed a new term, stagflation, into our lexicon, meaning simultaneously high inflation and unemployment.

An exhausted America had to step back and rely on proxies and allies to patrol the critical regions of the world. In the Middle East that meant Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran. He was a rare leader in the region who sided with America in the Cold War, embraced Israel and refused to join Arabs in their oil embargoes. He was willing to spend billions on American arms to protect the Persian Gulf. Retrenchment from the Middle East was not costly for Washington so long as the shah stood sentry.

Carter recognized this, and on one of his first trips abroad as president, in December 1977, he journeyed to Tehran. In a much-remembered toast, he celebrated Iran as an "island of stability" because of the shah's leadership. But over the next year, the Iranian revolution unfolded faster than U.S. policymakers could adjust their long-held assumptions about the shah.