Vanderbilt Political Review Fall 2013 | Page 14

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-