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Two presidents, similar foreign policy challengespublished at 08:24 Greenwich Mean Time
Anthony Zurcher
BBC North America correspondent
Image source, Getty ImagesThe presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden are separated by more than 40 years, but the foreign policy challenges the late president faced should be very familiar to the current White House occupant.
Carter grappled with the limits of American power, made painfully clear during the Iranian hostage crisis, when US embassy staff in Tehran were taken prisoner for more than 12 months.
The sense of American helplessness contributed to Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, with the prisoners’ eventual release coming just hours after Carter left office.
Biden had a similar dose of this cold reality during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which lowered the curtain on two decades of futile American nation-building there.
And more recently Americans watched a Chinese surveillance balloon drift across the continent – a visible symbol of what critics said was the inability of the US to monitor and defend its own skies.
Carter and Biden also were confronted by the territorial ambitions of global powers.
Carter was lambasted for inadequately responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – widely denounced for ordering a boycott by US athletes of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
Biden has had greater early success countering the invasion of Ukraine, uniting allies in an effort to resist the Russian advance.
But as the war drags on, American resolve will be tested.
Extended bloody conflict turned Afghanistan into a cauldron of instability that eventually gave birth to Al-Qaeda and a global jihad.
The impact of the war in Ukraine could have similar unexpected and deadly consequences – all of which could be laid at Biden’s feet.
