FEATURE
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
The 3 A.M. Phone Call
Karl Marx once said that history is “re-enacted twice over,
once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce.” The
1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the 2012 Benghazi embassy
attack were the result of incompetent foreign policy decisions by
Presidents Carter and Obama, yet the effect on each president’s
legacy has been markedly different.
O
n September 4, 2012, former
President Jimmy Carter addressed the Democratic National
Convention in a pre-recorded, four-minute video. After extolling Obama’s first
term and urging his re-election, Carter
declared, “overseas, President Obama
has restored the reputation of the United
States within the world community. Dialogue and collaboration are once again
The White House
14
by CHRISTIAN TALLEY ‘16
possible with the return of a spirit of
trust and goodwill to our foreign policy.”
Seven days later, America’s ambassador to a “liberated” Libya lay dead.
J. Christopher Stevens had asphyxiated
on the fumes of his burning embassy
as Libyan terrorists overran a perimeter the State Department had theretofore insisted was secure. He was the
first ambassador to be murdered in the
line of duty since 1979 -- when the
President was the DNC’s speaker, Jimmy Carter. Perhaps in this sense Carter
is an experienced authority on issues
of foreign policy: his diplomatic disasters in Afghanistan (the death of
Ambassador Adolph Dubs) and more
infamously, in the Iran hostage crisis,
would prove his political coup de grâce.
This essay argues that there are distinct,
but often overlooked, historical parallels
between the foreign policy debacles of
Presidents Obama and Carter. Comparing
Stevens’ death to the Carter administration’s failure in the Iran Hostage Crisis
reveals two important points. First, that
both crises were the foreseeable results of
naïve foreign policy. Second, that while
Carter was genuinely willing to risk his
career to rectify the failure, Obama and
his supporters have consistently deflected responsibility regarding Benghazi.
On February 14, 1979, Jimmy Carter
faced an unfolding catastrophe. Hours
before departing on “a crucial diplomatic trip” to Mexico, he received word at
11:15 PM that “unidentified” men had
kidnapped Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambas-