Jimmy Carter: Architect Of Peace

This writer was one of the participants at a training workshop on facilitative mediation organised by an agency in Nepal a few years ago. It was designed and led by two US mediation training experts Edward Miller and Therese Miller who had run several training courses of similar import in Sri Lanka and many other parts of the world. The training workshop was crafted into several modules placing larger focus and share of practical exercises, including buzz group discussions, role plays, mock drills, case studies and many other experiential learning methods. 

In one of the sessions during the training, a group discussion was held in which training facilitators shared with participants a big list of foundational qualities of an effective mediator and invited all in the room to name the persons who they think – be in their families, neighbourhoods, district, country or at the global level – would meet the requirements and have worked as the effective dispute resolvers and peacemakers in their respective contexts.  Some took the name of one’s own parents who made peace among the family members through their grit and grace while others named global figures like BP Koirala, Lord Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and so on as the examples of good mediators. 

Pragmatic idealist

However, when it came to the turn of the training facilitators themselves, Edward Miller named former US president Jimmy Carter who in his opinion was a pragmatic idealist who put his efforts and resources to make peace in the world.   Carter is known for his tireless work with Habitat for Humanity, and he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his efforts to promote peace and democracy around the world.

Carter is widely known in Nepal too who was effortful to help resolve the ten-year-long armed conflict in Nepal. He had come to Nepal leading the Carter Centre’s team to observe the first constituent assembly elections held in 2008 in Nepal. He is known worldwide for his success in negotiating the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt signed on 1978.  This was the first such treaty agreed between Israel and any of its Arab neighbours brokered by Carter between the then Israeli Prime Minister Minachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. 

The accord document was titled the framework for peace in the Middle East and the negotiations to conclude it had taken place at the US president’s retreat at Camp David, Maryland. Both Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1978 for their contributions to the agreements. The two leaders accepted Carter’s invitation, and their summit had lasted for 13 days. Carter, Begin and Sadat were accompanied by their leading foreign policy advisers, but Carter preferred that the three men work together in private sessions in a small office at Aspen, his cabin at Camp David.  Carter’s genius as a mediator was his belief that there is some innate goodness in every person, no matter the harm they may perpetrate.

At a time when Middle East is stuck into the spiral of intractable conflict engendered due to   Hamas-Israel fighting, it would be in order to take cognizance of the Carter’s negotiation strengths well documented in programme on negotiation (PON) reports and papers at Harvard Law School. Carter is often assessed as a weak president who failed to tackle the considerable problems facing the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s. Despite this criticism, Carter was a key architect of the Camp David accords who persuaded Sadat and Begin in negotiating their own resolution for peace. 

He ultimately put forth a detailed American peace plan, which became a working template that the parties could build upon and, ultimately, provided the framework of the final agreement. In the end, the Camp David Accords succeeded not because the most ideal partners were at the table, but rather because President Carter was available to push them ahead with an abundant amount of political courage.

Carter, for example, holed up at Camp David for two weeks in the face of soaring inflation and gas prices in the United States and an adverse situation in Iran. His bold stance contrasts with the more cautious approach of many politicians in our own era towards international conflict resolution. Switching from the role of facilitator to lead negotiator carries considerable risk for a politician. But when Begin and Sadat refused to engage with each other, Carter put forth the outlines of an agreement. Draft proposals he presented did inspire the Begin and Sadat to discuss intensively to discover underlying interests and deepen their understanding of the issues to reach to an agreement.

Results-oriented

Carter’s style was results-oriented rather than process-driven. He brought an engineer’s mind to every problem and was ready with possible solutions. He could be stubborn. But he was always willing to make principled decisions, even if they cost him politically. According to reports, when – as president in 1977 – President Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaties to hand over control of the canal to Panama by 1999, he was heavily criticized by many members of the US Congress.

But with the treaties, Carter ended an arrangement that had allowed the U.S. to control the canal and was viewed as colonialism by many Latin American nations. Carter always believed that negotiation was more fruitful than force. As president, he leaned into this philosophy with the Israeli-Egyptian peace accords and did the same thing to help Haiti reestablish democracy as leader of the Carter Center. 

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)