Biden should be more like Jimmy Carter

 Dear Editor,

Jonathan Alter’s superb detailing of “major” problems with the current Carter/Biden “analogies” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/01/14/jimmy-carter-biden-comparisons/) missed two profoundly important Carter contributions.  Commission reports that could have radically improved the increasingly chaotic world we have today if they had been popular reading.  First is the foresighted conclusion and warnings of President Carter’s 1980 bi-partisan Commission on World Hunger.  It stated “In the final analysis, unless Americans -- as citizens of an increasingly interdependent world -- place far higher priority on overcoming world hunger, its effects will no longer remain remote or unfamiliar.  Nor can we wait until we reach the brink of the precipice; the major actions required do not lend themselves to crisis planning, patchwork management, or emergency financing... The hour is late.  Age-old forces of poverty, disease, inequity, and hunger continue to challenge the world.  Our humanity demands that we act upon these challenges now...”   

It then warned that “The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order…  Neither the cost to national security of allowing malnutrition to spread nor the gain to be derived by a genuine effort to resolve the problem can be predicted or measured in any precise, mathematical way. Nor can monetary value be placed on avoiding the chaos that will ensue unless the United States and the rest of the world begin to develop a common institutional framework for meeting such other critical global threats… Calculable or not, however, this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.”

It then recommended “that promoting economic development in general, and overcoming hunger in particular, are tasks far more critical to the U.S. national security than most policymakers acknowledge or even believe. Since the advent of nuclear weapons most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. The Commission considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion. Armed might represents merely the physical aspect of national security. Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.”

This should have been Alder’s expose’s conclusion on MLK Day’s Washington Post Outlook section.  Along with the predictions listed in Carter’s Global 2000 Report ...which nearly all eventually proved accurate - and are now a “painful ‘what if’” for us and the rest of humanity.

“Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” Martin Luther King, Jr.