The CSPC Dispatch - Jan. 17, 2025
Welcome to a new year of the CSPC Dispatch!
In this first edition of 2025, CSPC Senior Vice President Peter Sparding reflects on the late President Jimmy Carter’s relationship with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and what it might teach us about our own time. Additionally, we highlight a contribution by CSPC Senior Fellow Jo-Anne Sears (and co-author Dean Cheng), looking at ways the incoming Trump administration should work with the House Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to secure supply chains.
As always, we hope that you will find the newsletter useful and would be delighted to receive your feedback or thoughts on how we can improve going forward.
Jimmy Carter and Helmut Schmidt: how countries can overcome personal tensions in international diplomacy
By Peter Sparding
President Jimmy Carter standing with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, outside the White House in 1979 (Library of Congress).
At the end of 2024, the United States lost a president and a remarkable leader. President Jimmy Carter died in Plains, Georgia on December 29, at the age of 100. For us at CSPC, this is a moment to look back at the legacy of America’s 39th president and to draw lessons from his time in office and his long life. In the United States, Carter is mostly associated with the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, his “malaise”-speech, the period of oil shocks, and his extraordinary post-presidency. A little less well-known might be Carter’s tricky diplomatic relationship with the leader of one of America’s key allies. As a new administration takes office in January 2025, the history of this relationship might also offer some insights for our time.
“The most unpleasant personal exchange I ever had with a foreign leader.” This is how President Jimmy Carter described a particularly heated meeting with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Venice in June 1980. In the meeting, Schmidt had confronted his American counterpart about a letter that Carter had sent him prior to the summit, which the chancellor had found insulting. In blunt terms Schmidt reminded the president that Germany was not the 51st state of the U.S. and even got into a heated exchange with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski. According to Carter’s memoirs, German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher later thanked the president for handling the difficult situation as he had done.
The personal relationship between the chancellor and the president was famously “prickly, as Schmidt’s biographer, Kristina Spohr, has termed it. The pair had gotten off to a rocky start when Schmidt had openly talked in the U.S. press about his great rapport with and appreciation for President Gerald Ford mere weeks before the 1976 elections, which pitted Ford against Carter. The realist Schmidt viewed Carter’s idealistic foreign policy outlook and focus on human rights as a grave danger to the efforts of détente and rapprochement between the Cold War blocs that had been achieved over previous years. At a personal level, he assessed Carter as a “moralist”, who was not up for the job of the presidency. Carter meanwhile thought that Schmidt was “volatile” and seemed to believe he knew more about other countries than their elected leaders. After losing the presidential election in November 1980, he confided in his diary that he was “glad to deliver Schmidt” to the incoming president, Ronald Reagan.
But Carter and Schmidt did not only squabble at a personal level. They vehemently disagreed about many of the issues on the transatlantic agenda. Amidst trying economic conditions on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter half of the 1970s, the German chancellor repeatedly pushed back against demands of the Carter administration for the Federal Republic to undertake stimulative economic efforts and for the German economy to act as a “locomotive” for the global economy. Schmidt initially viewed such entreaties from Washington as misplaced and as overestimating the economic power of the Federal Republic. He told American economists who favored such an approach to “go back and study the problems of Europe”. Until they had done so, he said, “they’d please better shut their mouths.” Similarly, Schmidt complained about Carter’s last-minute reversal regarding the development of a neutron bomb, disagreed with American sanctions policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and felt blindsided by Carter’s demands to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics (though West Germany in the end followed the American lead and did not send its athletes).
The Schmidt-Carter relationship thus stands out as one of the most contentious between a European and American leader in the post-war era. Yet, despite their personal disagreements, Carter’s term in office also saw remarkable examples of transatlantic cooperation. In 1978, G7 leaders were able to reach a substantial agreement for a coordinated approach to economic challenges at their meeting in Bonn. The Washington Post noted after the summit, that the critical meetings on the way to success had been those between the president and the chancellor. Though a renewed oil shock hit the global economy in 1979, posing new problems for economies on both sides of the Atlantic, in historical perspective, the “Bonn accords represent a rare and perhaps even unique example of international coordination of economic policies”, as Robert Putnam and Nicholas Bayne have argued. Similarly, it was Carter and Schmidt who played key roles in holding together NATO members as the alliance agreed to one of the most far-reaching decisions in its history in December 1979, when it settled on a “double-track” approach to the Soviet Union, offering renewed arms control negotiations while threatening the deployment of new U.S. Pershing II missiles in Europe.
At a moment where the outlook for personal relationships between the leaders of the United States and some of its allies may again be uncertain, the example of Carter and Schmidt might thus offer a reminder that mutually beneficial agreements remain achievable even under difficult circumstances. To be sure, times are different today and the Cold War offered a framework within which even significant conflicts could be contained and managed. On the other hand, by now most American alliances have been around and built on for many more decades. We should therefore hope that even as alliance diplomacy might be tested in the coming years, mutually beneficial deals can still be struck.
Discussions in 2019 about the trade relationship between the United States and China (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour).
Originally published in Breaking Defense on January 07, 2025
When Donald Trump takes office at noon on Jan. 20, 2025, he will face a very different threat environment from when he left office four years ago.
In particular, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that he will confront will not only be the pacing threat that he identified during his first term, but will pose an even greater challenge than the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.
The PRC is wealthier, in both absolute terms and relative to the United States, than was the Soviet Union. While COVID damaged both the American and Chinese economies, Beijing has nonetheless seen its GDP grow from $14.8 trillion in 2020 to about $18 trillion today. And China has more levers of power than its Soviet predecessor, able to mobilize its academics, media, businesses, diplomats and military to compete with Washington.