Carter Doctrine

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Ford International Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute for Technology. His contributions to SAGE Publications's Encyclopedia of United States National Security (2005) formed.

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Carter Doctrine, foreign policy initiative of the United States, introduced by U.S. President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address, that returned the country to its traditional strategy of containment of the Soviet Union.

In his speech, Carter declared that the United States would employ military force against any country that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf region. That announcement marked a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy, which had been focused since the beginning of Carter’s presidency on promoting international human rights and on pursuing détente with the Soviet Union. Carter’s policy of détente had culminated in 1979 in the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) II nuclear arms treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States.

In that year, however, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan undermined Carter’s policy of détente. Although the invasion was ostensibly aimed at supporting the Afghan communist government in its conflict with anticommunist Muslim guerrillas (the mujahideen), its ultimate motivation was not entirely clear. Foreign-policy advisers within the Carter administration speculated that the Soviet Union wished to prevent the spread of the Islamic Revolution (1978–79) that had erupted in Iran and that threatened to engulf the neighbouring Soviet republics. Others feared that the Soviet Union was returning to its earlier policy of expansionism. A possibility even more alarming to Carter’s administration was that the invasion of Afghanistan was the Soviet Union’s first move in an attempt to control the Middle East’s vast oil resources.

Carter apparently accepted the last possibility, which became the implicit rationale of his warning to the Soviets to refrain from aggressive actions in the Persian Gulf. But Carter was also responding to public opinion. Polls demonstrated that Americans were upset about the invasion of Afghanistan, that they believed that the invasion and other events of 1979 (most notably the taking of 52 American hostages by Iranian militants in the Iran hostage crisis) had made the United States—and specifically the Carter administration—seem weak and indecisive, and that they did not support the SALT II treaty. As the 1980 general election approached, Carter concluded that he needed to take a more-confrontational approach with the Soviet Union if he expected to serve a second term.

After his State of the Union address, Carter outlined specific measures that he would take to implement his new doctrine. They included the withdrawal of the United States from the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow, the suspension of grain sales to the Soviet Union, and the withdrawal of the SALT II treaty from Senate consideration. He also recommended a 6 percent increase in the defense budget and created a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force that could be quickly dispatched to any combat zone in the world. Finally, he issued a presidential directive ordering the development of smaller nuclear weapons that could be used to strike highly specific targets. With that directive, which envisioned the possibility of a “limited” nuclear war, Carter abandoned the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, which had previously (from the 1960s) governed the nuclear strategy of both the United States and the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately for Carter, his new doctrine did not result in his reelection. Even if the Soviets had planned to push further into the Middle East, fierce Afghan resistance soon created havoc for the Soviet invaders. In his election campaign, Carter’s opponent, Ronald Reagan, supported the president’s new doctrine but argued that Carter’s overall foreign policy had failed, leaving the United States in a weakened position. Influenced by the continuing hostage crisis in Iran (which was made even more humiliating by the failure of a secret U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages in April 1980), most of the public agreed, and Carter was voted out of office.