larry johnson speaks all things from jimmy to the coming year;

The death of former President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100, does not mark the end of an era. Actually, his death is an exclamation point for the disastrous US foreign policy of the last 45 years, especially with respect to the threat from Islamic extremism and the troubled relations with Russia. Jimmy Carter’s reign set the stage for much of the current unrest and turmoil in west Asia and Ukraine. While it is true that Mr. Carter worked diligently after leaving Washington, DC to burnish his image as a humanitarian, his policies towards Russia and Iran became festering sores on the American political body that linger, still suppurating, until today.

James Carden, writing in the American Conservative, has done a masterful job of summarizing Carter’s toxic foreign policy — The Untold Story of Carter’s Fateful Foreign Policy. Carden, rightfully so in my opinion, pins much of the blame for Carter’s foreign policy failures on his choice of a National Security advisor — Zibigniew Brzezinski:

Scholars like Brzezinski drew a straight line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no allowances were made for the vagaries of succeeding Soviet regimes. The late professor of Russian politics at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, who was a leading theorist of the rival “revisionist school,” had crossed paths with Brzezinski at Columbia in the 1960s. Cohen was critical of what saw as the “deterministic quality” of the scholarship produced by high profile members of the “totalitarian school” such as Brzezinski and Harvard’s Adam B. Ulam, who, like Brzezinski, was a Polish immigrant. ........more.......