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.What made the situation doubly grave were the
upheavals in Iran.
The conduct of US policy in the Middle East
earned for Carter both the biggest praise and the
most severe condemnation. For thirteen days he
tirelessly laboured at Camp David in September
1978, and the Accords reached there between
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat had laid a firm
basis for peace between Israel and Egypt.
In Iran, Carter had continued the US policy
of unconditional support for the Shah despite his
human-rights abuses. Until late in 1979, given
the support of the army he had modernised, the
Shah was believed safe, the ally of the US and
policeman of the Gulf. But it appears that the
administration was badly served by the advice it
received from intelligence sources and diplomats.
Assessment of the Shah’s chances of survival was
not made until the autumn of 1978. In January
1979 he fled the country. The fanatical new rulers
of Iran, who gained power the following month,
condemned the US as the ‘Great Satan’, and the
moderates lost control. When the terminally sick
Shah was admitted to the US for medical treat-
ment in October 1979, the radicals in Teheran
used it as a pretext to escalate their attacks on the
US. Demanding that the Shah be returned
to stand trial, they seized the US Embassy that
same month and took hostage the sixty-three
Americans they found there. The hostage crisis
overshadowed Carter’s last year in the White
House. He opposed using force, fearing that the
hostages’ lives would be in danger. Instead he
imposed economic sanctions, froze all Iranian
assets in the US and broke off diplomatic rela-
tions in April 1980. Later that same month he
approved a mission to rescue the hostages by air-
craft and a specially trained task force. It went
tragically wrong. Eight men of the rescue mission
were left dead in the desert for the Iranians to
gloat over. It was a profound humiliation and
contributed to Carter’s loss of the presidential
election in November, although the hostages’
release was negotiated later by the administration.
Spitefully, they were not allowed to leave by air
from Iran until half an hour after the inaugura-
tion of Ronald Reagan on 20 January 1981.
The Carter administration had ended with a
period of inflation and economic troubles in the
wake of the second oil-price rise in 1979–80.
Carter looked like a perpetual loser. The energy
crisis was only temporary, but somehow the
president became fixated on it. Congress was
proving recalcitrant, so Carter addressed the
American people on nationwide television in July
1979, claiming that ‘energy will be the immedi-
ate test of our ability to unite this nation’. It was
an extraordinary exaggeration. In what became
known as the ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, he
attacked Congress and painted a dire picture of
the future. The problems of America, he claimed,
had their origins in a ‘crisis of confidence’. Ronald
Reagan, by contrast, was upbeat and optimistic.
He promised a new beginning, an America that
would ‘stand tall’; he appealed for a renewal of
patriotism, a new beginning. Many Americans did
not bother to vote in the presidential election in
November 1980, but those who did gave Reagan
a decisive majority over the luckless Carter.