As Jimmy Carter marks his 100th birthday on 1 October 2024 – the first American president to reach such a milestone – he remains, to some extent, an orphan in the grand narratives of the American century. From January 1977 to 1981, his presidency was marked by turbulence and crises, and, out of the chaos, grew a new form of American power. But Carter still defies easy categorisation; the very circumstances that made his presidency transformative and elusive have overshadowed his legacy.

Many recall Carter as a man who espoused decency and diligence: the Georgian farmer who returned to his pastoral heritage after the short blip in his life when he happened to be the most powerful man in the world. Carter’s time as a Sunday school teacher, his work for Habitat for Humanity and his international service, which culminated in his receipt of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, have, in many regards, eclipsed his work as president.

Carter’s amorphous quality offers him as a warning or an aberration – The Outlier as one biographer titles their book – whose rise and fall followed in quick succession. Coming after the presidencies of Richard Nixon, marred by Watergate, and Lyndon Johnson, overshadowed by Vietnam, Carter is further eclipsed by his charismatic successor, Ronald Reagan, who reaped the benefits of the 1970s’ reordering. In recent biographies, published before the 2020 presidential election, Carter is presented as an answer to the dilemmas for American liberalism after Trump. Jonathan Alter admits in His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, ‘I write out of fragile hope that the life story of our thirty-ninth president might help light our way back to some sense of decency, accountability, and seriousness in our politics.’ Joe Biden even appears at various points in the books as a youthful prince in waiting – though fastidiously loyal to the Carter administration. Biden, writes one biographer, ‘joked that at age 33, he was still two years shy of the constitutional age requirement to be president. So, since he couldn’t yet run himself, he was backing Jimmy’.

Carter’s nebulous legacy is precisely why his relevance endures, however. That there is no single subject associated with him should compel us, as he turns 100, to keep searching his record and impact for a better understanding of why he is an apparent exception. For Carter, there was no great war to command, no grand summit to negotiate, nor ‘third-rate burglary’ to orchestrate. He was a president bedevilled by his circumstances and whose perceived failure – as even the most powerful figure in the world – is starkly illustrative of both the persistent nature of global crises and the less visible legacies that leaders can leave behind. As we approach the 2024 presidential election, the interplay of war, energy, and the global economy is a subject that lingers on from Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Born in Georgia, where he served one term as governor, Jimmy Carter was a liberal politician from the segregated American South. He grew up in a farming community in Plains, so small that he knew his wife, Rosalynn, since her birth: Carter’s mother was a nurse who delivered Rosalynn and then brought her two-year-old son over to meet the new baby.

Carter’s early life had to balance between the contrasting ideas of race and federal authority in the American south. Carter ran for governor on the slogan, ‘Vote for Jimmy Carter, our kind of man, our kind of governor’, a racially coded tagline that explicitly emulated George Wallace’s in Alabama. His biographer Kai Bird records an incident in which Carter’s son sat in class when someone rushed in to tell them that President Kennedy had been shot. ‘That’s good!’ cried the teacher as the students cheered.

Carter entered political life as the segregationist sentiment in the Democratic Party in the south was cleaving away from American liberalism and the Civil Rights movement became more active in electoral politics. Before entering office, Carter was invited to join the White Citizens’ Council – the associated web of white supremacist, segregationist organisations in the South – but refused, and he made friends with the network of Martin Luther King’s friends and advisors still active in the Atlanta political scene. Elected governor in 1970, Carter quickly emerged as a fresh faced outsider on the national stage, gaining traction as the Republican administrations in Washington lost credibility after Watergate. After completing his single term, he wasted no time launching a relentless bid for the presidency. For 260 days, Carter crisscrossed the country, tirelessly visiting 250 cities and towns in 46 states. He narrowly won the presidency in November 1976.

The crises of the 1970s exposed the vulnerabilities of American power, as the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the 1973 oil embargo, and the subsequent inflationary spiral disrupted the postwar economic order. When Carter entered office after the 1976 election, he confronted these intertwined crises, each feeding into a broader sense of impending collapse that permeated both political discourse and private anxieties. ‘Time is indeed short’, warned Gene Hogberg in the pages of the Plain Truth in October 1978. ‘The dollar – and the United States as a world power – are on the way down and out. The endtime events prophesised in the book of Revelation are rushing in on an unsuspecting world.’ The evangelical magazine did not offer any suggestions for how the United States could reassert its monetary hegemony in order to stave off the apocalypse, but it did conclude with an urge to readers to purchase its booklet The Book of Revelation Unveiled at Last so that ‘you will not be caught off guard!’

Throughout his four years of presidency, Carter could not escape a pervasive sense of weakness to contend with the crises or restore a diminished United States on the global stage. His young team of White House advisors seemed at odds with the urgency of the moment. One observer described his staff as ‘a hard-drinking, fornicating, pot-smoking, free-thinking group as has been seen in higher politics’. Yet Carter and his team understood that they governed at the twilight of the postwar order – a period of unravelling amid the collapse of public trust following Vietnam and Watergate, and the economic shockwaves caused by the 1973 oil crisis. As Pat Caddell, the president’s pollster, candidly wrote to him, ‘This crisis is… the natural revolt of historical forces and events which have been in motion for 20 years. This crisis threatens the political and social fabric of the nation.’

The interconnected set of emergencies came to a head in January 1979 when the Shah of Iran fled after a year of revolutionary turmoil and, in the Middle East, oil production fell and prices rose. The oil shock manifested in double-digit inflation that fed into the wider discourse of American malaise. ‘During every great inflation’, Ronald Reagan said, ‘there is a striking decline in both public and private morality.’ In May, a prominent judge was assassinated in Texas; in June, truckers, who carried 85 per cent of the nation’s food, went on strike; in July, the nation was transfixed by the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. The price of gas rose over 55 per cent since January, and 58 per cent of service stations had no gas at all – a proportion that rose as high as 95 per cent in New York.

In July 1979 Carter diagnosed the nation’s condition as a ‘crisis of confidence’, warning that it ‘strikes at the very heart and soul of our national will’. His speech took on the language of war: ‘On the battlefield of energy, we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.’ Carter called for a kind of total war, waged against those forces undermining the livelihoods of Americans. He invoked the resilience of past generations who had triumphed over greater challenges, reminding the country of its historical strength.

With the drumbeat in their ears, the Carter administration was set for a radical assault to end inflation and restore the dollar to a higher value. The president chose Paul Volcker, an experienced economist and policymaker, as the new head of the Federal Reserve. After a fraught meeting of the IMF, in which a series of finance ministers urged Volcker to rescue the dollar and end inflation, the chairman of the Fed returned to Washington, DC. In a special Saturday meeting in October 1979, Volcker and his associates voted to rework how the Federal Reserve operated monetary policy – choosing to restrict the quantity of money in the economy in an approach known as ‘monetarism’ – and raised interest rates.

‘Mr Volcker is a gambler. He is betting high with a poor hand. The entire nation needs to hope that he beats the odds,’ wrote the New York Times in a jingoistic editorial titled, ‘Mr. Volcker’s Verdun.’ ‘By forcing interest rates to shoot up like a signal flare, Mr Volcker, like France’s Marshal Pétain at Verdun, seeks to assure his own forces that the enemy “shall not pass”. Marshal Pétain did hold the fort—at the cost of 350,000 casualties. No lives are directly at stake in slamming the gates on credit but the risks are nonetheless substantial.’

Compelled by a sense of urgency and the rhetoric of war, Carter appointed Volcker in full awareness of the likely scale of the coming assault on inflation, and the president’s legacy became entwined with the epic transformation of the American economy that followed. Over the next three years, the full impact of the ‘Volcker Shock’ emerged as the federal funds rate climbed to 19 per cent, the prime lending rate to 21.5 per cent, and mortgage rates to 18 per cent – the highest levels since the birth of Jesus Christ, as one world leader remarked. Unemployment rose to 10 percent during the resulting recession.

The United States would emerge from the Volcker Shock as a more dynamic global power, but the domestic consequences for employment and industry were severe. Since the Second World War, the US had operated, as historian Charles Maier called it, as an ‘Empire of Production’. By the end of Carter’s presidency, it had evolved into an ‘Empire of Consumption’. America became the world’s absorber of goods and capital, building a global financial system underpinned by its promise of stability. In 1982 the US entered a balance of payments deficit for the first time since its ascent to superpower status – a deficit that has only grown. This was not merely an adjustment but a profound realignment of America’s role in the global economy. The growth of national debt, tied to US Treasury securities, became the bedrock of the global financial system, marking another of the most significant shifts in American power.

Carter and Volcker’s economic reforms were inseparable from wider events that imperilled the international order and its reliance on oil from the Middle East. On 4 November 1979, after the Shah had been admitted to the United States for medical care, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran. Within the space of a few weeks, it appeared the stability of the entire Middle East was threatened. On 20 November, Islamist militants seized the Grand Central Mosque in Mecca, inciting further fear of collapse. Oil prices surged as Western nations grappled with the rise of Islamist revanchism – a powerful backlash against the geopolitical forces that had empowered the Gulf states. The very energy system that had fuelled postwar global development now seemed to be sowing its destabilisation, as the Gulf’s increasing wealth fanned the flames of fundamentalist resentment. Then, on Christmas Day 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, amplifying what Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called the ‘Arc of Crisis’, a band of instability stretching across the Middle East and South Asia.

The Iranian hostage crisis was perhaps the most visible threat to Carter’s presidency, but the solution lay not in military might, but in the burgeoning power of the American financial system. As Iran’s revolutionary government railed against American imperialism, it found itself economically crippled by the extensive reach of US financial influence.

The new Iranian regime declared it would never honour the Shah’s debts and threatened to withdraw its deposits from American banks in order to destabilise the dollar. The press interpreted this as a sign that Khomeini was targeting ‘the entire international monetary system for destruction in Iran’s economic war against the US’. In response, Carter enacted unprecedented sanctions on Iran’s financial assets, wielding the financial system as a potent weapon. Reflecting on the strategy in his memoirs, Carter noted, ‘I thought depriving them of about $12 billion in ready assets was a good way to grab their attention.’

Concurrent to Iran’s violent pronouncements against American expansionism was a quite desperate attempt to recoup some economic power as it lost opportunities to sell its oil and the financial means to support that. On 3 December, the same day that Ayatollah Khomeini was formally elevated to Supreme Leader, the head of Iran’s central bank accused the US of attempting to ‘strangle’ the Iranian economy. Yet, in a curious twist, that same morning, the Wall Street Journal ran an advertisement from the new regime addressed to the American business community. ‘The truth of the matter is’, it stated, with the next sentence printed in large, bold letters: ‘Iran will honour all of its legitimate foreign debts.’

Beneath the fiery anti-American rhetoric, Iran could not escape the realities of its financial entanglements. By May 1980, Iranian officials discreetly approached Citibank’s lawyers, signalling interest in a potential deal: the exchange of Iran’s frozen assets for the release of the American hostages. With quiet approval from the State Department, Citibank’s counsel entered months of secret negotiations with Iranian representatives across Europe.

In September 1980 the stakes intensified as war broke out between Iran and Iraq. Desperately reliant on US-made military equipment, Iran faced a growing need for ammunition and supplies to fend off Iraqi forces. Meanwhile, the diplomatic landscape shifted dramatically in November with the election of Ronald Reagan, a president-elect who was expected to take a far harder stance on Iran than Carter. This looming deadline injected new urgency into the talks. In a surprising move, senior Iranian officials suddenly pledged to repay all outstanding loans to US banks, a concession that astonished American negotiators and broke the months-long deadlock.

On 19 January 1981 – just one day before Reagan’s inauguration – the hostages were released, bringing a dramatic end to one of the defining crises of Carter’s presidency. While the spectacle of the hostages’ captivity often overshadowed it, the resolution of the crisis was as much a product of financial manoeuvring as it was of diplomacy or military pressure. Carter’s handling of the affair underscored a crucial evolution in US foreign policy: the growing use of economic leverage, alongside military force, as a key instrument of American global power.

After the oil shocks of the 1970s, Carter was the first American president to build America’s military and economic posture around the protection of its interests in the Middle East. In tandem with economic warfare, Carter recalibrated American military strategy in the region following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For Carter and his advisors, the prospect of Soviet control over the region’s vital oil reserves represented an existential threat. ‘Soviet control of the oil tap in the Middle East would mean the end of the world as we have known it since 1975,’ warned James Schlesinger, Carter’s secretary of energy. In response, the Carter Doctrine was developed, committing the United States to using military force to defend the Persian Gulf from any external threat. Carter ordered the US Navy to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a critical choke point for global oil shipments, and established a rapid deployment force that would evolve in 1983 into CENTCOM – the US military command responsible for operations across the Middle East.

Carter’s presidency, often remembered for its crises and struggles, laid the groundwork for the era of American power that would dominate the following decades. Popular memory sees the figure who governed but misses the more consequential shifts hidden behind the individual. The superpower status of the United States in the late-20th century was premised upon the financial and military arsenal that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Motivated by a jingoistic spirit and urgent crises, Carter’s administration waged war on inflation and reoriented American strategy toward the Middle East and the stability of the global economic and energy order.

The postwar period that followed the 1970s featured a new form of American supremacy in the world. The Volcker Shock saw interest rates rise dramatically to combat inflation and led to a severe recession in the early 1980s, causing widespread closures in US manufacturing and industrial sectors as companies struggled with high borrowing costs. However, it also transformed the financial sector by solidifying the dominance of Wall Street, paving the way for a more finance-driven economy as capital markets flourished under a regime of tighter monetary control. Since the Volcker Shock, the dollar has accounted for some 60 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves – while the US only contributes around a quarter of global GDP – and the dollar is bought or sold in nearly 90 per cent of global foreign exchange transactions. As Hal Brands writes, ‘From geopolitics to geoeconomics, American statecraft was accelerating the pace of positive change, and moving the global system in a more unipolar direction.’

Jimmy Carter should not be commemorated as an unfortunate exception in postwar America, whose legacy is imprinted with his electoral loss in 1980. He was a president whose most consequential actions were reactions to crises beyond his control, yet who ultimately – and in many ways, unwittingly – shaped the globalised world by adapting America’s role to the upheavals of the time. If Carter’s presidency does not offer a legacy to emulate then it should stand as a cautionary tale of the limits of power, reminding us of the importance of humility, even for those who hold the most influence.