Jimmy Carter won his place in history

It may be that Democrat Jimmy Carter’s four-year term as US president has become, to some, a derogatory synonym for weakness in the White House and what America’s allies do not want to see in a US commander-in-chief.

But the legacy of the former peanut farmer from Georgia who, against the odds, rode a wave of unlikely post-Vietnam and post-Watergate populism to win the Oval Office in 1976 – long before Donald Trump thought of it – has other aspects and deserves better than that.

As The Wall Street Journal noted, perceptions of Mr Carter – who died on Sunday, aged 100 – may be tarnished forever, deservedly, by his bungling over the US embassy hostage crisis in Iran. But he also scored substantial achievements on the world stage through his mix of moralism and painstaking personal diplomacy.

Mr Carter, as The Wall Street Journal said, “transformed the Middle East by brokering the Camp David Accords”. They remain the bedrock of the enduring – and once thought inconceivable – peace that continues between Israel and what was then its most serious adversary, Egypt.

The record of the Carter years between 1977 and 1981, however, understandably is overshadowed mostly by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Washington’s misreading of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s evil intentions and the Carter administration’s strategically costly unwillingness to back shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a long-time US ally, and the embarrassing failure of the rescue mission to free the American hostages held at the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days.

Mr Carter’s presidency never recovered. It was a failure that continues to have dire consequences – for Iran’s hapless people no less than countries across the Middle East, especially Israel.

Mr Carter was crushed by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, his overwhelming defeat delivering a powerful message to succeeding generations of US and other political leaders about the importance of demonstrable strength and decisiveness in government.

To say that should not be to ignore Mr Carter’s considerable achievements. Neither should it be to ignore the almost unique decency and humanity that he showed in office and in the tireless charity work schedule he maintained for most of the 43 years after he left the White House, frequently working as a carpenter for the Habitat for Humanity charity to build homes for the poor.

It would be all too easy to deride Mr Carter’s turbulent presidency and dismiss it as inconsequential. And it may be that history will remember him more favourably for his work as a former president than a White House incumbent.

But politicians everywhere have much to learn from him. The Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2002 spoke of his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote social and economic development”.