The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Jimmy Carter and Jihad - MNNO's Take

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

MNNO (aka Michael) is the Director of Analysis at Zeihan on Geopolitics. You heard Peter's take yesterday...and now you get a different perspective on Jimmy Carter's "legacy".Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan

Hi, it's Michael here from the team at Zog. Today's Monday, December 30th, and roughly 24 hours ago, the passing of former President Jim McCartor was announced. All of likely just watched a video from Peter talking about his views and analysis on the long-term consequences and overall impact of the Carter administration.

Now, I think it's pretty safe to say that Peter's overall assessment is a relatively positive one. In addition to being pretty much probably the nicest guy who was ever U.S. President, whether intentionally or not, Carter did institute, a lot of reforms, as Peter described, specifically when it comes to U.S. energy policy and sort of laying the foundation for the future energy renaissance of the United States. Unfortunately, I don't think that that worldview, that rosiness,

is necessarily warranted for a lot of the foreign policy hiccups that came about during the court administration being super fair here there was a lot that happened especially in the last two years especially in the last final year of their court administration but i think it's important to note that when somebody runs successfully on being an outsider a political outsider This also means that they don't have a lot of the institutional experience and resources when it comes to things like U.S. regional policy in the Middle East, completely falling apart, or dealing with a last serious expansionist push by the U.S.S.R. So, with that said, I think that there are three major policy. We can call them hiccups. We can call them. poor decisions. We can, you know, frame it, whatever it is.

But at the end of the day, there's three, maybe four mistakes made by the court administration that I think subsequent presidents have had to deal with. And I'd argue we are still largely dealing with today. So with that said, number one for me would definitely be the arming and financing, the Mujah had been in Afghanistan. Now, in the end of 1979, the U.S. presidency had to grapple with the collapse of not only the Shah's regime in Iran, but along with it, the dissolving of the U.S. security apparatus in the region. Iran was a very crucial part of the Americans monitoring and surveillance networks, especially for the southern, eastern portions of the Soviet Union. There were times where U.S. planes would fly sorties daily multiple times a day.

Out of running airfayals, they would use Iran to monitor train track all sorts of Soviet shenanians. I think a good example now would be Azerbaijan's alleged use by Israel to monitor the Iranian's return. Anyway, so there's a lot of pressures here. on the president. You're going to make the best decision with what you've got. And I think, you know, we can be fair and objective about this. I don't know if the Carter administration had what it needed or engaged from sort of just cool geopolitical reality in terms of what impact a policy of sending arms of money to jihadis for lack of a better term would have, not just on U.S. policy, but

regional security. Frigermore. You know, all the blame was interested on the Carter administration. Once the Reagan administration came in, whatever Carter and folks were doing in Afghanistan got supercharged. So Reagan took the original

arms and guns to the Majidine, famously added stinger missiles to the mix, had the Chinese come in and support them, gave dirty-day management of the whole affair to Pakistan's ISI. I think at the time contemporaneously, even without the benefit of this workful perspective, the Pakistanis were not, are not the people. I would ever trust to manage a lot of things. A militant network is definitely one of them.

And we saw the Middle East, the Gulf States, Saudi sending cash and not just cash, not just weapons, but a large amount of a certain segment of a society that couldn't be metabolized at home. The exploity bits, the people who were most likely to blow something up at home, they sort of just kick them off the tap. And a step. Stepping back, you know, what the U.S. did was not just use militancy as a tool or use a local militant group to push back against it. adversarial government that had been done before, it had been after.

But especially after the expanded scope under the Reagan administration and the success, which was really just Russia's failure in Afghanistan, a lot of regional governments took note. And here I'm looking at the coal fees, the Arab States, Turkey to a lesser extent, very much so the Islamic Republic of Iran, they saw what you could do with a relatively little money, some guns, and none of your own people to have far-reaching consequences. Is it safe or fair to say that the court administration is sort of the grandfather of transnational jihad? I wouldn't go that far. But I would definitely

say once you got that American stamp of approval and you have internationally recognized success, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. And obviously there are consequences that came out of that Afghanistan was never going to be a stable place. But with jihadis having more money, more weapons, and internationally recognized success, it's not difficult to see why the Taliban, Afghanistan, Salaam bin Laden, etc., etc., all had safe refuge there. and why we've, from a U.S. perspective, struggle to sort of stop having regional groups keep following this playbook. Second is the court administration's handling of the entire Iran affair. Not just the revolution in 79, not just the protests that led up to the revolution in 79, but after the 1953,

coup in Iran, the U.S. precipitated coup against Mosadegh. Eventually, what became the CIA, took over a program that was shelling out over two decades, millions of dollars to Iranian mullahs, basically to have them play nice. Like, here's cash. Don't, don't wrap the boat. It's a desert country.

You know, don't blow shit up, literally. That ended in 1977. And for a lot of reasons, if you want to get a little more I want to say conspiratorial, but I want to get a little more excited or excitable within a group of Iranian diaspora.

You would say that assertion of Iran over its oil and gas rights, a intractability by the Shaw, vis-a-vis the West when it came to domestic security concerns, fears about an over-reliance on the Shah, and the lack of confidence in this air, etc., etc.

push the U.S.C. utility in maybe being able to use the religious establishment in Iran as a potential counterweight or balance against the Shung. Card administration miscalculated. But the thing is, you have decades-long relationships with these groups. No one should have been taken by surprise at their intentions, the level of organization, and their ability to seize unhold power as soon as the Shah left. I also think that, again, with the benefit of a sort of perspective, the court administration could have done more to support the Shah's regime. And this, you know, if you see my last name, if you ever wonder, my dad is a refugee. He came to the United States as a UN-bedded refugee from Iran after 1979.

I don't have a particular dog in the fight, though. I am not a loyalist. Iran's government is the responsibility of its people to sort of start out. But I think from a perspective of wanting to secure American objectives and prerogatives in the region, they, you know, they fumbled that ball really bad. And finally, and perhaps the most controversially, is I don't understand why the court administration is so lauded for the Camp David of course. I mean, having said that, obviously, peace between Egypt and Israel is great. but it came at a cost and it came in a cost of essentially

sort of distilling the net of this allowing Egypt to negotiate on Jordan's behalf especially when it came to setting up an apparatus in the West Bank for administration of an ill-defined Palestinian autonomy and at its heart

what happened here from my perspective and I'll argue from that of many within the region is Jordan was sidelined and the United States proved itself to be an unreliable, political, or security partner, if expedient. I think for many in the region, whatever their attitudes, jealousy, fear, etc., about the special relationship between the Shah and Iran, 79 also showed to them that the U.S. is the unreliable security or political partner. So you have to hedge in your own way. I would also argue that some of the long-term effects of the energy reforms instituted by the court administration also denied the Middle East its primary leverage in engaging with its primary security back at the United States on equal footing. Again, it's not equal footing, but the semblance of equal footing.

So you have governments wary and distrust of the U.S. you have governments seen the U.S. unable to help or undesirous to help its primary security partners in the region. Stay afloat in the face of rising pushback. They see a very spooky situation in Iran with the rise of the Islamic Republic. And then they see the success of exporting jihad or supporting. transnational militancy. All of this

rapidly in succession between 77, 78, 79, 80. The parting, I could maybe this is number four, but the parting sort of gift of Carter to the region was the Carter Doctrine, which in 1980 stated that the United States would use force

to protect its interests in the Persian Gulf. This was an eye toward if the Soviets were able to expand from Afghanistan, three around, and then threaten oil exports out of the Gulf. The United States sort of announcing, you know, we'll step in, we'll take care of it.

And again, this is maybe a little unfettered as card administration, but the Reagan corollary to that sort of included Saudi Arabia under American protection. It set the stage, arguably for U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf twice. the ongoing quagmire wars of Afghanistan, again, then obviously from my perspective, and then you'd be surprised to say a direct descendant of Carter administration decisions,

and I think in summation beyond the loss of life, the greater instability in the Middle East, the threat of transnational jihad everywhere. I think at the end of the day, this series of decisions made by the court administration had a direct line toward the instability in Afghanistan. Its ability to be used by regional jihadist groups to launch an attack against the United States, a lingering preoccupation with the Middle East by U.S. policy makers and leadership,

a 20-year war that extended across four presidencies. And in the top of the list, a sense that we need to overfocus and over-commit to the Middle East. East, even as American energy production is taking off, preventing the U.S. to engage more robustly with a pivot to Asia or developing ASEAN, renegotiating NAFTA earlier, investing in domestic manufacturing, engaging more robustly with Mexico vis-a-vis. It's burgeoning drug war, figuring out something in Europe between its demographic collapse, intense internal competition and aimlessness for NATO, not anticipating the rise of Russia earlier, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So that's why maybe my view of the Carter administration isn't as a rosy. If you found this interesting, if it disagree with me, let me know. you can talk about it. And as always, I really appreciate everyone's attention and your support.