{"id":526483,"date":"2026-06-09T16:19:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T16:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/526483\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T16:19:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T16:19:12","slug":"is-donald-trump-the-new-jimmy-carter-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/526483\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Donald Trump the new Jimmy Carter? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

No two human beings, let alone US presidents, could be less alike than Donald Trump<\/a> and Jimmy Carter<\/a>. One was a frugal \u201ccitizen servant\u201d; the other is Trump. But they have Iran<\/a> in common. Carter\u2019s presidency was hijacked by the Iran hostage crisis \u2014 a disaster he could never escape. Operation Epic Fury is a trap Trump entered blithely. Iran\u2019s theocrats are thus also defining his presidency.<\/p>\n

Both share an allergy to US body bags. Carter was conscience-stricken after losing eight Americans in his aborted hostage rescue attempt. So far Trump has lost 13 US service members in the Gulf. He fears a public backlash to more US deaths. \u201cThere was a time at the very beginning when we thought about doing that,\u201d Trump said last week when asked if he planned to seize Iran\u2019s stash of highly enriched uranium. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to be Jimmy Carter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet that is who Trump is becoming. Once the idea forms that a US president is prisoner to what others decide, the scent of impotence is hard to shake. That invites danger. Carter\u2019s inability to free the hostages fed into the Soviet Union\u2019s decision to invade Afghanistan a few weeks after the US embassy in Tehran was stormed. But for the actions of Pope John Paul II and Carter\u2019s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski<\/a>, the Soviets would probably have invaded Poland.<\/p>\n

Trump is the hostage at the heart of today\u2019s Middle Eastern maze. This weekend the president told me: \u201cI call the shots. I call all the shots.\u201d That seems doubtful.<\/p>\n

Though he urged Israel not to retaliate against Iran\u2019s missile attacks on Sunday, Israel went ahead anyway. Hours later, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered an attack on Iran. It is possible that Trump tacitly approved Israel\u2019s response. But the near-universal impression that he is unable to control Netanyahu could be fatal to his prospects of ending this war. Iran will not concede anything big to a president who cannot control Israel\u2019s response.<\/p>\n

Trump is thus also hostage to Iran\u2019s mindset. As a precondition to talks, Iran insists on a complete ceasefire in Lebanon. Whenever Israel strikes targets in Lebanon, including in response to Hizbullah\u2019s rocket attacks, Trump\u2019s bar to reaching a deal is raised. That Hizbullah, Iran\u2019s proxy, has not agreed to any ceasefires rubs it in. Iran itself is undermining any chance of peace in Lebanon. That only reinforces Trump\u2019s powerlessness; Iran and Israel are now dictating the direction and duration of this war.<\/p>\n

\"IranianIranian students climb over the wall of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, leading to the hostage crisis. Photograph: Getty Images <\/p>\n

How can he escape this nightmare? By doing three things that he will be loath to do. The first would be to prove he has a veto on Israel by threatening to cut off US military aid unless Israel sticks to a ceasefire and withdraws forces from all but a narrow strip of Lebanon. The second would be to array as much expertise as the Iranians to haggle over detail and for as long as necessary. The third would be to communicate consistently that he will stick to those two paths. But he lacks the patience. Character U-turns are rare in people turning 80.<\/p>\n

Which leaves compensating actions. This is where Trump diverges from Carter. America\u2019s 39th president turned the hostage crisis into a barometer of his power. He adopted the \u201cRose Garden strategy\u201d of refusing to campaign for re-election \u2014 and even left the National Christmas Tree near the White House dark. In so doing, he handed control of the narrative to the Iranians. Trump has also lost control of the plot. But he is a showman, not a preacher, so his instinct is to change it. That means actions in theatres where he can prevail.<\/p>\n

The meat of Trump\u2019s national security strategy published last December was to reassert US dominance in the western hemisphere. The word Iran appeared three times but only to brag that last summer\u2019s Israel-Iran ceasefire was one of the eight supposed peace deals Trump had negotiated. This document was published soon after the Nobel Peace Prize was announced. The winner, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, Venezuela\u2019s opposition leader, donated her trophy to Trump, who had brazenly campaigned for the prize. Though Trump now controls Venezuela\u2019s regime, Machado has yet to see any benefit from her gesture.<\/p>\n

Here is where Trump and Carter enter parallel universes. Carter rejected the Monroe Doctrine on which America had based its original hemispheric dominance. Trump has revived it. Cuba<\/a> should watch out. Canada can never sleep easily. Denmark should note that Greenland is still in Trump\u2019s sights. Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize partly for brokering peace between Israel and Egypt. Trump has shown he is not in a position to broker anything outside his own backyard. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Keith Duggan: Peanut farmer-intellectual Jimmy Carter was just what Americans needed. They still require his ilkOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Keith Duggan interviews Edward Luce: ‘There’s a menace to life in America that wasn’t there before’Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No two human beings, let alone US presidents, could be less alike than Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,48750,356,13,14,6,18929,69967,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-526483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-cuba","tag-donald-trump","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-jimmy-carter","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116721062154311461","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}