Carter in Ethiopia

THE award of the Nobel peace prize to former president Jimmy Carter is a manifestation of selective memory. What follows is a story about how the precepts of the Carter administration’s human-rights policy—and that president’s aversion to the use of force in the defense of moral principles—became an impediment to possibly saving 30 million Ethiopians from the undertow of totalitarianism.

The story begins during the Nixon and Ford administrations, when the murderous Ethiopian Dergue (“Committee”) and its merciless leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, rose to power concomitant with the domestic distraction of Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam. The Dergue began executing its own followers and threatened to do the same to more members of the Ethiopian royal family. Since Mengistu’s ruthless and dynamic regime seemed unlikely to fall, the outgoing U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, trying to keep an iron in the fire, continued some of the military assistance that had been going to Addis Ababa. If the United States were to give up all its leverage in Ethiopia, the country would simply take the next step and become a Soviet satellite, with vast and unpleasant consequences for its entire population.

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan

Mr. Kaplan is the author, most recently, of The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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THE award of the Nobel peace prize to former president Jimmy Carter is a manifestation of selective memory. What follows is a story about how the precepts of the Carter administration’s human-rights policy—and that president’s aversion to the use of force in the defense of moral principles—became an impediment to possibly saving 30 million Ethiopians from the undertow of totalitarianism.

The story begins during the Nixon and Ford administrations, when the murderous Ethiopian Dergue (“Committee”) and its merciless leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, rose to power concomitant with the domestic distraction of Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam. The Dergue began executing its own followers and threatened to do the same to more members of the Ethiopian royal family. Since Mengistu’s ruthless and dynamic regime seemed unlikely to fall, the outgoing U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, trying to keep an iron in the fire, continued some of the military assistance that had been going to Addis Ababa. If the United States were to give up all its leverage in Ethiopia, the country would simply take the next step and become a Soviet satellite, with vast and unpleasant consequences for its entire population.

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan

Mr. Kaplan is the author, most recently, of The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.