His achievements are little remembered but consequential: pardoning Vietnam-era draft dodgers, winning ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, engineering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China, implementing a historic human rights policy, and responding to crises in Afghanistan and Poland in ways that helped the United States win the Cold War.

You wouldn’t know it from most obituaries, but former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was a visionary president on foreign policy.

You wouldn’t know it from most obituaries, but former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was a visionary president on foreign policy.

His achievements are little remembered but consequential: pardoning Vietnam-era draft dodgers, winning ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, engineering the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, normalizing relations with China, implementing a historic human rights policy, and responding to crises in Afghanistan and Poland in ways that helped the United States win the Cold War.

Even his signature failure—the aborted mission to rescue 52 U.S. Embassy staff members held hostage in Iran—was not the complete fiasco depicted at the time.

So why does Carter remain so disrespected as a foreign-policy president? There are two explanations.

First, Carter was an ardently noninterventionist commander in chief. He was the only president since Thomas Jefferson under whom no shots were fired in anger on the battlefield and under whom no soldiers were killed or wounded in combat. (Eight Americans died in the failed rescue attempt, but many more casualties would have been likely had Carter refused to allow the mission to end in humiliation in the desert.) This bias for peace—as well as Carter’s failure to master the stagecraft of the presidency—contributed to an impression of weakness.

The second factor was a concerted effort by conservatives—including former U.S. President Ronald Reagan—to smear him as soft.

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