Taft–Hartley Act. Other federal regulatory meas-
ures were passed that protected the environment
in Alaska and limited the damage done to the land
by strip-mining.
Carter did not achieve anything like all the
reforms he had hoped for during his presidency.
He would have had better relations with Con-
gress had he employed a less high moral tone
and more flexibility. His White House staff, also
Georgian outsiders, lacked the necessary experi-
ence to handle Congress more skilfully. They
were surprised by how long it took for the legis-
lative process to be completed; they sent many
measures to Congress without having established
a clear idea of their priorities. A centrepiece of
Carter’s endeavours in the wake of the oil-price
rise of 1973–4 was to cut down on the extrava-
gantly wasteful use of energy in the US. But his
energy plan ran into opposition from many inter-
est groups. For the average American, freedom is
a car and cheap gasoline. After more than a year
of wrangling, a watered-down National Energy
Act became law in the autumn of 1978.
In the relations of the US with the rest of
world, Carter was determined to strike a new
note. He wanted to reduce tensions, especially
with the Soviet Union, but was also determined
to stand up for human rights, ‘the soul of our
foreign policy’. He promised to be positive, to
give as much attention to relations with the poor
Third World as to East–West relations. In June
1979, SALT II was concluded with the USSR, by
which the superpowers accepted a balance of
nuclear missile capacity between them. Although
bitterly criticised it left each side with far more
warheads and missiles than would be needed to
turn any nuclear war into a holocaust. MAD
(mutual assured destruction) remained intact as
the doctrine of the day. This required that some
US missiles should survive any first strike. In
pursuit of this doctrine, a number of crazy
schemes were devised, but in the end none was
adopted. At the heart of the administration, there
was a conflict between the policies advocated by
Carter’s aggressive National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the more conciliatory
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, with the State
Department supported by the military.
In Latin America the perceived need to
combat communism led to a drift of policy, but
the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977, by which the
US agreed the eventual transfer of sovereignty
over the Canal Zone to Panama, was one of the
clear successes of the Carter foreign policy. But
uncertainty was evident in the administration’s
dealings with the revolution in Nicaragua.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in Decem-
ber 1979 reinvigorated the Cold War. The Carter
administration was particularly alarmed by the
strategic threat now presented to the Gulf and its
oil and warned the Soviet Union off in forthright
terms, Carter declaring that an
attempt by any outside force to gain control of
the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
1
THE UNITED STATES 795
A historic handshake on the White House lawn.
Israel’s Prime Minister Begin and Egypt’s President
Sadat seal the peace deal concluded at Camp David
on 17 September 1978, brokered by President Carter.
© Corbis
