Jimmy Carter's Foreign Policy

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Per this writer, at the beginning of his government Jimmy Carter had been governor of a southern state with no national or international involvement. Nevertheless, while having his own foreign policy goals. Carter believed in the rule of law in international affairs and in the principle of self-determination for all people. Furthermore, he wanted the United States to take the lead in encouraging universal human rights. Carter believed that American power should be exercised carefully and that the United States should avoid military interventions as much as possible. Thus, he wanted that American relations with the Soviet Union would continue to expand, and that the two nations could come to economic and arms control agreements that would diminish Cold War tensions. Carter's …show more content…

support for human rights involved encouraging "human freedom" worldwide and protecting "the individual from the arbitrary power of the state." Carter's first challenges involved the U.S. role in Panama. In 1904, it was the agreement that was negotiated by President Theodore Roosevelt which permitted the U.S. to use and dwell in the Panama Canal Zone. This was a strip of land adjacent to the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, where the U.S. claimed to have the right to defend American lives and property in Panamanian cities. In 1964, after anti-American riots by Panamanian students, the U.S. and Panama agreed to negotiate on the future status of the zone. The greatest foreign policy success of the Carter presidency involved the Middle East. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, between Israel and its Arab enemies, Egypt and Syria, the Israelis had gradually detached their forces and moved a distance back in the Sinai Peninsula. Carter invited Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat to sit down with Carter at Camp David, in a rural presidential retreat outside Washington, where the president and aides conducted with the two leaders a kind of footpath

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