Ken Stein to Scott Slade: Carter Had a Loaded Deck at Camp David
January 9, 2025
WSB radio veteran Scott Slade interviewed CIE President Ken Stein about President Jimmy Carter and the Camp David peace process for an episode of “Scott Slade’s Georgia” that aired just hours before Carter’s funeral January 9, 2025.
Note to user—the audio here is an abbreviated version of the transcript of the full 45 minute interview found here
Scott Slade: This is Scott Slade, speaking with Emory University Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History and Political Science Kenneth Stein. We spoke to Dr. Stein about the legacy of Jimmy Carter and to get his perspective on current events in the Middle East. Well, as we mark the life and times of President Jimmy Carter, his accomplishments in fostering Middle East peace, especially the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, just keep emerging as a highlight of his presidency. And Dr. Ken Stein, who we’ve spoken to many times on Middle Eastern topics, I wonder if you agree: Was that the highlight for foreign policy for President Carter?
Ken Stein: I think across the world people remember the Camp David Accords and the bringing together of Begin and Sadat. What’s interesting is that there’s really an inverse reaction in the United States at the time.
Pat Caddell did some surveys both before and after September ’78 before the meetings actually took place. And within four months after Carter had these guys together, his popularity went up 1%. In terms of the Middle East, it was a sea change because now you had the largest Arab state, which had been at war with Israel since its founding in ’48, now in ’79 it was signing a treaty, and Israelis were saying, “OK, we’ll give up land in order to make it happen.” So both Begin and Sadat were absolutely critical, and over time, I think, Scott, I’ve concluded that Begin and Sadat were inching really closely to one another already before Carter invited them to Camp David in September ’78.
You remember Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in July of ’77. Well, Sadat and Begin had been having emissaries meet with one another privately through Romania, through Iran, through Morocco, and they got a pretty good sense of one another. By the time you get to the early part of ’78, Begin and Sadat are eyeing each other for their own particular reasons.
Carter told me something really interesting. I interviewed him three times while I was working at the Carter Center, three times in the ’90s, and Carter said to me in one of those interviews, he said, “I didn’t tell anyone at the time, but when Sadat was at the White House, and he visited with me in April, he said, ‘I don’t think, Mr. President, there’ll be peace in my time or peace during my tenure in office.’ And Carter said, ‘You know, that’s really not good enough.’” And Sadat almost immediately — and I got this from the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, who was in the room at the time, a guy by the name of Hermann Eilts, brilliant diplomat that served in Saudi Arabia — Hermann said and confirmed what Carter told me, he said Sadat said, “Mr. President, if I have to, I’ll make peace with them in the next couple of years, but I need a lot more than just an agreement with Israel.” Now, Carter tucked that idea in his hip pocket, and when I asked him later on, did he share it with Vance, he said no. And I said, “Did you share it with Brzezinski?” His secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively.
So, Carter, when he went to Camp David in ‘78, he knew that Sadat would go a bilateral agreement. He knew that, or he had a sense of it. It wasn’t like all of a sudden showing up and for the first time on the basketball court learning what a basket is and learning that you got to put a ball in the hoop. So Carter, Begin and Sadat were well primed for one another.
Now, that doesn’t take anything away from the Camp David negotiations and the give and take and the detail and the wrangling that went over words. That was Carter, and that was stewardship, and that was wordsmanship. All terrific attributes. But Begin and Sadat, they wanted to do something, which is a real lesson for today. I know I’ve gone on long with this answer, but the lesson for the moment is, if the two sides to a conflict don’t want an agreement, there’s nothing that the mediator can do to make it happen. In other words, the outside party can’t force the Palestinians and can’t force the Israelis to negotiate if they don’t want to.
No matter how many think tank pieces are written or how many editorials come out of, you know, Tom Friedman and The New York Times that a two-state solution is critical, if they don’t want it, it’s not going to happen. And that’s the difference, because Begin and Sadat wanted an agreement.
So, long answer to a great question: He is remembered for it, and he should be. But he also had two wily politicians who knew that they could bring their domestic constituencies with them. The Israelis and the Palestinians don’t have constituencies or leaders that are going to go reach an agreement. Not today.
Scott Slade: Well, that’s fascinating that Carter knew pretty much which cards were in a short deck, it sounds like.
Ken Stein: I think he did. And I think he knew that they were all face cards. You know, this wasn’t going to be, you know, twos, threes and fours. And he had an amazing State Department. He didn’t like the State Department per se because he thought there were too many leaks. Brzezinski thought that too. But he had four or five people at the State Department who had worked under Kissinger and who were really talented in understanding the politics of Israel, politics of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, you know, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan.
And he had a great team of talented folks. When Reagan came to office in 1981, all but one of them had left their position. And the fact that Reagan didn’t want to continue the negotiations is a different question. But he didn’t have the talent, didn’t have the bench talent that Carter had. And when Carter came to office, he had Kissinger, who had already stumped out two agreements between Egypt and Israel and one between Israel and Syria.
Again, I’m not taking anything away from the Camp David Accords, but in the context of what happened, he had two guys who wanted to make a deal. He had a precedent in what Kissinger had accomplished, and he looks even better because Reagan and the folks that followed him as president couldn’t make anything happen. So that’s the context.
Scott Slade: More than 40 years later, do the terms of the Camp David Accords, pretty much, are they still in effect? Is it still valid?
Ken Stein: Well, there were two parts. One was an outline for a treaty between Egypt and Israel. And, of course, that came into being. Camp David was in September ‘78, and the treaty came into being in March of ‘79, six months later.
And then the Israelis withdrew from Sinai, and they withdrew from the settlements, and the Egyptians sent their ambassador, and they had cultural exchanges. The Egyptian-Israeli relationship over 45 years has stuck. It’s been testy at times, but it’s glued together. It even glued together during the Hamas-Israel war when Egypt and Israel really were very angry at one another and how the border between Gaza and Egypt was being monitored and whether the Israelis should be there or not. But that treaty bent; it didn’t break.
The second part of Camp David was a framework of understanding that the Palestinians would engage in self-government or autonomy. I don’t know how you define autonomy, but they would rule themselves. But the Camp David Accords of 1978 never spoke about a Palestinian state, never spoke about Palestinian self-determination, never spoke about Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The Israeli political leadership was not about to turn a Palestinian area over to the PLO that was considered hated, terrorist, and was only interested in killing Jews and Israelis.
So you had a consensus in Israel that there wouldn’t be a Palestinian state, but you could give the Palestinians or provide the Palestinians with self-rule. That didn’t unfold until 1993, and it unfolded because the Israelis and the Palestinians decided that maybe it was time for the Palestinians to really exercise a measure of self-rule.
And I remember quite vividly Carter had asked me to fly up on a Delta flight with him to go with him to the signing on September 13th as he normally would do. I would follow him around from interview to interview. You know, we go from NBC to CBS to Fox to CNN to CNBC, whatever it was. And he’d speak for three to five minutes, and we’d get up, and we’d go to the next one. We’d walk over, and we’d take two minutes in between. And he would look at me, and I would say, “I don’t think I would use this word, but I’d use that phrase.” And we did these six or seven times between 7 in the morning and 9 o’clock.
By the time he got finished, he looked at me, and he had a big smile on his face. I said, “You know, that’s a 99. The last one was really, really good.” He liked someone listening, and he liked someone paying attention to what he was saying. And he also didn’t mind someone suggesting that little nuances be adjusted.
The man knew a lot about Arab-Israeli politics and diplomacy because he studied it deeply. The Oslo Accords of 1993, later on that day, we had a lunch together or whatever it was, and we were talking, and I said, “You’re pretty buoyed by today, aren’t you?” And he said, “Well, it’s finally happened, Ken. It’s 15 years later, but finally the Palestinians look like they’re going to have a place to rule themselves. And it’s 15 years late, but at least it’s unfolding.”
So Carter had always in his head after Camp David that what the Palestinians didn’t get in ’78, ’79 and ’80, they were finally beginning to approach receiving in ’93. And again, in ’93, Scott, no promise was made for a Palestinian state. Arafat negotiated an agreement that was terrible for the Palestinians because he didn’t insist that there should be self-determination. Arafat really was not an advocate of self-determination because Arafat’s definition of self-determination was “I determined by myself.”
There were elections in 1996, and we were monitors of those ’96 Palestinian elections. And the Palestinians were thrilled, pleased and delighted to be casting ballots for the first time in 70 years for their own legislators.
And what did Arafat do? In three or four years he suspended the legislative council and just continued to rule as an autocrat. And that greatly disappointed Carter. Carter was really disappointed that the elections didn’t turn into something of self-governance. But the accord stuck, in the sense that the Israelis have always had to think about how they would allow or permit the Palestinians to have self-rule without a state, for fear that the state would end up being what the Gaza Strip became.
And then there was the other legacy of Jimmy Carter, and that was Iran.
Scott Slade: Well, you were there during several trips to the Middle East as well, right, with former President Carter. How effective a negotiator was he after his presidency?
Ken Stein: Yes, we traveled in ’83, ’87 and ’90, and it was Rosalynn and usually his very loyal and lovely, efficient secretary, Fay Dill. And he always was curious to learn more about the region. I would set up meetings with him with professors in Jordan or in Cairo or Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and he loved those hour-and-a-half sessions where he could just ask questions incessantly in real detail.
And he never got a chance really to practice a skill of mediation that he had evolved, I think, both as a person and as a professional. I think Carter liked bringing people together. He enjoyed someone telling him he couldn’t do something. If you told him, “You can’t do that, Mr. President,” he’d look at you, and within 24, 48 hours, he’d just go ahead and try it anyway. Which was a great trait to have, but it also created the sense of self-assurance that people saw as haughtiness on his part. Because he believed that if he made decisions, other people should follow.
Stu Eizenstat wrote an interesting biography of Carter. And Eizenstat, along with a guy by the name of Peter Bourne, who wrote an earlier biography of Carter, said the same thing about him: that his self-confidence made him believe that he would always be successful. That didn’t always work, let’s say, in Washington when you wanted to negotiate for domestic legislation, and you had to negotiate with Capitol Hill and Congress. Carter didn’t always have the patience to work with individuals who could pave the way to affect the kind of change that he wanted to.
Sometimes he did. I mean, he displayed it at Camp David because he had these two guys. He also had them locked up for 13 days. And, you know, some of the Congress people, Hamilton Jordan said this about Carter — I know I’m getting away from the mediation question, but it’s a stream of consciousness that I think is worth sharing — Hamilton said, you know, later in the ‘80s after they lost, he said, “One of the reasons we did not succeed as well as we should have, we were told in the 1970 gubernatorial election when Carter didn’t win, we were told that you can’t do this. You’re just a small guy from South Georgia. And it was Carter’s relentless determination that he was going to be a candidate and then be elected.” And he had this belief when, you know, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon and Jody Powell and Pat Caddell, they go to Washington, and they thought the way they won the election would be how they could govern.
And Hamilton said that “that was a mistake we made. We were a little bit too self-consumed with ourselves.” Robert Strauss, who was involved in Carter’s election in 1976 and again in 1980, Strauss did an interview for the State Department in which Strauss said Carter’s great success was he came to office because he was considered an outsider in a post-Watergate/Richard Nixon/“we want someone who’s not a Washingtonian,” and Carter succeeded at that. And Strauss said that was Carter’s success.
And Hamilton said the same thing. He said that was our success, but Strauss also said that Carter tried to govern as an outsider and didn’t take as much time as was necessary to do the backslapping and the handshaking and the trade-offs that were necessary in making policy turn into legislation. Now, you know, Robert Strauss was from Texas. Hamilton Jordan was from Georgia. And they both come to similar conclusions about how the Carter administration was elected and then how it governed.
And I think that was a lesson that other presidents probably should take away, is that what it takes to be elected and what the American people are wanting in your candidacy, the process that you use in getting there, is maybe not the same process that you can use effectually and efficiently when you govern.
Carter loved, enjoyed reaching out to people who were considered untouchables. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. He believed that there was good in everyone, maybe naively so. I mean, to go to North Korea and to embrace the North Korean president as if they’re going to, you know, all of a sudden walk hand in hand with the South Koreans, not likely. He embraced Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Bashar Assad’s father, never condemned the father for the attacks on Muslims in 1983. He could have; he didn’t. And he never said a negative word about Bashar Assad and his brutality of his own Syrian people from 2011 forward. Carter, for some reason, Carter always wanted to keep a door open to the people who otherwise international leaders wouldn’t speak to, and he felt he had to give folks their voice or their agency.
He went as far as to embrace Hamas. He thought Hamas should be an ideal negotiator with the Israelis because once they get into negotiations, he argued that they will drop their ideology. Again, pretty naive.
But Carter, I think he was naive in the sense because he believed that there was good in everyone, and he could bring out the good in everyone. And he realized he couldn’t do that. Reality doesn’t permit that. That doesn’t diminish the fact that he tried, and I think when he tried and he failed, many people considered him to be, you know, meddlesome and naive, and he should keep his mouth shut, and he’s a former president, and what is he messing around with the world when he’s not president in ‘93 or ‘95 or 2011?
But I thought about it a little and, well, maybe a lot. I think Carter really was energized by working in the world as a stage rather than necessarily working in America. I think he realized that his presence internationally gained him honor and prestige. He actually effected change, but he never really picked up in his post-presidency to do many things that might be called domestic. Did he ever speak out on Social Security or tax reform or regulation? He did as president, but he wanted to embrace world issues because he didn’t have to face the contentiousness and the cantankerous nature of an American media or establishment institutions or lobbying groups.
He had free rein when he roamed the world. And for a guy who was really devastated by his loss to Reagan in 1980, and I think many Georgians forget that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter came back to Plains, Georgia, absolutely crushed. I think crushed is a good word. And they had to rebuild their lives.
And I don’t mean in the sense of their health, but in terms of doing things that were positive. And the Carter Center became that podium, that place where — I don’t think he started out thinking it was going to be his second presidency, but it evolved as his second presidency because he used it as the place to speak out about issues that matter to him. But they were international issues.
And I don’t think many presidents who succeeded him were really thrilled that he was messing around in world affairs. You know, everyone has come back, who has succeeded him, Scott, has said he was this and this, and we admire him for that and that. But you take a look at Clinton, you take a look at Obama, you take a look at Bush, you take a look at Bush I, you take a look at Reagan. While they were president, their engagement with Carter was always tense, was always a little bit friction-oriented because Carter wanted to get involved, wanted to be engaged, and a lot of times he came into direct confrontation with the sitting president. But that didn’t deter Carter. Carter had a view, and he was going to promote it.
Which goes back to what Eizenstat and Peter Bourne said about if Carter had something on his mind and he thought it was the right thing to do, he was going to move with it.
Scott Slade: Something that I’ve lost in the sands of time here, Ken, what happened after President Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, especially his attitude toward Israel?
Ken Stein: I think Carter felt that he should have gotten the Nobel Prize with Sadat and Begin in, I think it was ‘78. And I know there was discussion always in the ‘80s at the Carter Center that his name was being presented as a candidate, and there were people in the international community who were working hard against Carter’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. And we know that for a fact. I won’t go public with it, but I know at least three or four people who worked really diligently to keep him from getting the Nobel Prize in 2000, and he finally did. And he was recognized for his humanitarian work, and rightly so. I mean, all the health care stuff he did and eradication of river blindness and Guinea worm and all that. Those were all positive things.
I think 2002 and the Nobel Prize made him believe — now this is just my sense. I have no evidence. It’s just an inclination — made him believe that he was right about pushing the Israelis to negotiate with the Palestinians and only in 2002 did the Nobel Committee affirm that. Now, he won the award for his humanitarian work. But I know he believed that one of the reasons that they overlooked him was because of work he’d done with Begin and Sadat. And after 2002 he becomes much more aggressive, much more forceful in pointing his finger at Israel and saying, “You’re not doing what you need to do. You should be doing more.”
He would not point his finger at Arafat and say, “Look, you stole the elections of ’96.” He wouldn’t do that because for him he was the voice of the Palestinians. And, once again, Carter believed that the underrepresented or those who didn’t have the kind of voice he thought they should have, Carter wanted to be that agent. And when 2003 goes to 2004 and then he begins to embrace Hamas, and then he writes his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he really becomes an advocate not just for the Palestinians but being angry and forcefully so at Israel to the point where Israeli prime ministers didn’t want to meet with him when he came.
I think Carter believed after he left the White House in 1981, he said to me on many occasions, not once and not twice, but half a dozen times or more, he used the phrase “If they’d only give me a chance, I could finish with this.” And what did he mean by that? He meant that “if an administration or a group of leaders would give me a chance to mediate this, I can get it done.”
And he felt it. I think at the end of his life, he probably felt it was an opportunity. He never was given a chance. Again, you know, he had said to me, I know at least twice in the early ’80s, once we were on the tarmac during the air traffic controller strike, and he said, “You know, if I hadn’t lost to Reagan, by now,” and it may have been ’82 or ’83, ’84; I don’t remember exactly. He said, “By now we’d be well on our way to Palestinian self-governance.” And I looked at him and I said, “The West Bank is not Sinai, and Arafat is not Sadat,” and he just shook it off. He had this powerful feeling within him that he could make the difference and he would make the difference if someone would give him the chance.
And there were several times in the ’90s and the early 2000s when he actually went to Washington, and he actually quietly probed the possibility of being again appointed. And, you know, I got this from staffers on committees where he sat in sessions, and he actually said, “Why don’t you appoint me?” He said it to George Bush at our Oval Office meeting in 1987. He said, “I know Assad will go to a properly structured international conference. And I know if I’m there, he’ll come.” And Bush looked at him, and Schultz looked at him, and it was like “Are you kidding? You really believe that?”
Carter carried this belief with him that he wasn’t being given a chance. And I think after 2002, I think he was even more angry that he wasn’t given a chance. That’s the only explanation I have. You know, I never talked to him about it after I resigned from the Carter Center in 2006. But I did talk to him before that, and he said to me that after the Nobel Prize, he felt it was his responsibility to really push the Israelis to make an accommodation.
Scott Slade: I haven’t asked you in a while, it’s been a while since we’ve spoken, but just veering off to current events, and I realize this would be a three-hour discussion, but what’s Ken Stein’s take on what needs to happen to resolve the situation between Israel and Palestine now?
Ken Stein: You need leadership. You need leaders who are going to look over the horizon. You need leaders who are going to recognize the sovereignty of the other. If the Palestinians and the Israelis don’t recognize each other’s legitimacy to have sovereign states, you’re not going to go anywhere. You can’t negotiate with someone who wants to see your demise or someone who wants to deny your existence. And there are elements both on the Israeli side and the Israeli far right and certainly elements within the Palestinian community, as evidenced by Hamas and their ideological supporters in Iran, that they’d be just as happy to see Israel go away.
I think, and this may sound a bit pessimistic, no, it’s very pessimistic, this may be an issue that can’t be resolved for a good period of time because the respective sides don’t trust one another and the environment that surrounds Palestine interests and Israel is highly unstable, more unstable today than it was when Begin and Sadat signed an agreement on the White House lawn.
It’s not just that Israel would be making an agreement with the Palestinians to see a Palestinian state. What will the neighbors think? And will those neighbors want to undo what’s being done? There’s a habit in the Middle East of political leaders thinking that they can play in the neighbor’s sandbox and do what they want when they want to do it. And the unrest in Syria, and is Lebanon going to be pieced together again with barely a functioning economy and a currency that’s not working? Iran is reeling not only because of the devastation caused to its aerial defense by the Israelis, but it’s reeling because its economy is so upended: 90 million people, and its economy is coughing and is sputtering. I don’t know how long the Iranian revolution will last.
So if I were negotiating on the Palestinian side, I’d want to be able to do it in a way where I would get some guarantees that the surrounding countries aren’t going to mess up what I negotiate. And if I were the Israelis and I were negotiating, I would want to be sure that If the Palestinians are going to negotiate, then they really mean it, and they’re really going to end the conflict with me or us.
Begin and Sadat didn’t have a problem recognizing each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That wasn’t an issue. The issue was, what are the Israelis going to give up, and what are the Arabs going to give up? I don’t think this conflict can be resolved by logic or give and take. It may be just one that lingers on. And I don’t say that because I’m a historian of the conflict, and I hope you’ll call me on the phone in a year, and we’ll have to talk about this again. I don’t think the elements are in place for this to be resolved. And may be the best you can get would be the Palestinians can live by themselves, onto their own, make their own domestic decisions but not be involved in controlling their borders. And that may be the best that you can get. And then you have to have Israelis who are willing to say, “I don’t want to settle in all the territories of the West Bank,” and that’s not there either, Scott.
I need to say this even if it’s not a question. Carter left this important legacy of Egypt-Israel relations because ultimately Jordan signed on, and then United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco and the Sudan, and all the Arab states signed on because they thought it was in their national interest to do so. They did it because they thought it was important for their people, and they thought they could postpone or not spend as much time focused on the Palestinians as they once did because they felt many of the Palestinians were not giving their all and giving their best to reach a conclusion.
Now, whether that’s true or not is not the issue, but that was the perception, or that is the perception. If the United States were not involved in being sure that these Arab states received some carrots from Washington, I’m not sure that these Arab states would have stuck with the agreements they made with the Israelis. Now, I think the UAE and Bahrain certainly have every national interest to have a great relationship or a good relationship with Israel, as does Egypt and Jordan. But the fact that the United States could sweeten the deal made a difference. It was all said and done. Those six countries and Israel are all tied to the United States in some manner militarily. And the U.S. provides for economic or military assistance. If anyone believes that the next administration coming to office is going to pack it all in and leave the Middle East, that’s about as naive as you’re going to get.
Because if you think you’re going to, the Middle East is going to come back and bite you. And with 30 or 40 or 50 percent of the world oil coming out of the Middle East, and China and India and other far Eastern Asian countries using Middle Eastern oil, the Middle East is not going to go away, and it’s still going to be important in terms of our economy.
And you can say you want to withdraw from overseas. But it’s still the United States that’s the stabilizer in international politics. I’m amazed that as a historian, I can say this: The ‘70s and the ‘80s in the Middle East was so much more stable than it is today in 2024 or ‘25. And that’s because in part we had a Cold War, and people knew what side they were on, and countries were not falling apart. Middle Eastern Arab states are falling apart. Someone could say, well, they’ve been falling apart for a quarter-century. Well, they have, but that doesn’t do much for populations.
What do you do with these massive numbers of people? We’re going to go through this winter starving because their brutal autocrats killed them or made them homeless. I don’t know where you get the money to create a Palestinian state. I don’t know where you get the $2 billion a year for 10 years to make it happen. I don’t know anyone that’s put their hand up and says, “I’ll do it.” I’m somewhat of a pessimist, but I think I’m a pessimist because the region has really changed in the 50 years since I started teaching at Emory
.
Scott Slade: That’s a very rich answer. I appreciate that. Before we leave each other, anything you’d like to add as a coda to the life and times of Jimmy Carter?
Ken Stein: A couple lessons. Governors who become president don’t all of a sudden become experts in foreign affairs. Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Bush II. That means they have to rely on smart foreign policy advisers, and those smart foreign policy advisers can begin to dominate the outlook of the president. The second two years of a presidency are different than the first two years, and, of course, Trump’s coming back for his fifth and sixth and then seventh and eighth years. And we have to find a better way to get people who become president knowledgeable about international affairs. And Carter was just emblematic of one of them.
And the other lesson or finding, I guess, I don’t know if it’s a lesson, is we in the United States are devoted to a philosophy of believing that issues can be resolved by give and take and negotiations, reason, and logic. That may not be the case in many parts of the world. Israel made a huge error by not believing Hamas and its ideology that said they wanted to kill Jews and destroy the state. Do we really understand radical Islam? I mean, I’m watching all the major networks try and figure out what happened in New Orleans and try and figure out if there’s a connection between a Telsa blown up in Las Vegas near a Trump property. And folks are focusing on were the individuals connected, or were the individuals related, or what rental truck was used, or could the New Orleans police have prevented the car from going over the barrier? The minuscule details of the events. And I’m stepping back, and I’m saying, is it possible that 9/11 is again at our doorstep?
And radical Islam — and I’m not talking about all the Muslims in the world, I’m talking about radical Islam, I’m talking about the ones who want to die for the belief that Islam is a superior religion — are we focused on the right topic? Should we get a better understanding of, as one author wrote, why these people hate us? Can we grasp the reality that Western liberal democracy and materialism and gender equality is not accepted by everyone in the world, and that there are folks who are willing to die in order to see that belief destroyed or those beliefs destroyed?
So the Carter legacy here is Andrew Young said that Ayatollah Khomeini was going to be a saint or was a saint, and we had five or six academics who were waltzing around in ‘79 and ‘80 saying not to worry about Khomeini, this guy is a democrat. Yes, well, it’s not the democrat that I understand, whether it’s a big D or a little d.
I don’t think we know enough about foreign cultures, and I don’t think we study them enough. And we don’t allow for the reality that those foreign cultures may not be exactly like Jeffersonian democracy. And we would do a better job of educating our own kids, not unnecessarily that radical Islam is bad, but understanding that not all problems can be resolved simply because we think they should be resolved. American exceptionalism, when taken to an extreme, is damaging to us as a people and as a nation because we think that we have the answers to all the problems, and we don’t.
The one aspect of my teaching that I think Carter enjoyed a great deal, and he was a terrific student, and I don’t mean he was a student of mine in the sense of he studied every day. He liked learning the nuances of the political culture of the Middle East. And I think one of the reasons he liked learning it because he didn’t know it growing up in South Georgia. How would a person in South Georgia who became governor understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam? How would they even know what an ayatollah was?
We’re very parochial in the United States, and we have to be less parochial and more worldly in understanding other cultures. And I think we can make better decisions in managing. So that’s a Carter legacy, which is part of a bigger legacy of how we train our own, and how can we do better?
Because I think we can do better as Americans and in making policy.
Scott Slade: It is always a rich experience to speak with Emory University Professor Emeritus Kenneth Stein. It’s a pleasure. Ken, thank you so much for your time.
Ken Stein: Scott, thank you for letting me go on. But there remains a great deal more; I hope people who listen to this will learn and go explore further on their own.