Discuss the ways in which Jimmy Carter offered the USA a different Foreign Policy agenda. Hamish Grundy – AM-240 In 2011, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is reported to have affirmed in a conversation with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping that ‘no President of the United States could represent the United States were he not committed to human rights… it doesn’t make us better or worse. It’s who we are.’ 143 Biden’s assertion that this commitment to human rights is ‘who we are’ owes itself to the policies and commitment of Jimmy Carter. Although Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were responsible for bringing it to the attention of the international community through the Helsinki Accords, Carter made it clear that human rights would be central to American actions abroad. 144 David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker note that Jimmy Carter sought to ‘re-direct American foreign policy away from the logic and policy of containment’, which had been the corner stone that presidents had built their foreign policy around since 1947. 145 He stated that human rights were a ‘fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.’ 146 His pursuance of a strategy that he believed would ‘regain the moral stature that we [the United States] once had’ ensured a 143 Evan Osnos. Born Red: How Xi Jinping, and unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao , The New Yorker (April 6, 2015) 144 Ibid. 145 David F. Schmitz, Vanessa Walker, Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History , Vol. 28:1 (January 2004), pp. 113-144 (p.119). 146 Jimmy Carter, University of Notre Dame: Address at Commencement Exercises at the University," May 22, 1977.
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