In his four years as President, Carter managed through weakness and ineptitude to create crisis after crisis.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, he pledged to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea--a pledge that emboldened the North Koreans to position eight additional infantry divisions and 35% more tanks against the South. North Korean bellicosity forced Carter to break his pledge, but he had left behind a deadly permanent legacy: It was during the Carter years that the North Koreans started their nuclear weapons program. As president, Carter startled the world with his credulity and naivete.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he said he had learned more about the Soviets that one week than in all his previous life. But he never learned that weakness in an American president means danger for the whole world. His indecision helped to bring the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran--and to put a terrorist regime in control of the most powerful state in the Middle East. Khomeini's chosen heir, who presently holds supreme executive power in Iran, is now sheltering perhaps as many as two dozen al-Qaeda leaders.

Carter is often credited with the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. The credit is undeserved. Carter's eagerness to propitiate the Soviets--and his unconcealed hostility to the Israelis--inspired him to endorse the old Soviet idea of resolving the Middle East conflict in a gigantic multiparty peace conference co-chaired by the United States and the USSR. This idea terrified Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who had expelled Soviet military advisers from his country when he caught the Soviets plotting against him in 1972. Rather than resubmit to the Russians, Sadat opened secret bilateral negotiations with the Israelis in 1977. Camp David was the result.

One would have supposed that Carter touched bottom in 1980, when he lost the presidency by the largest margin of any incumbent since Herbert Hoover. But after his catastrophic presidency, Carter launched a new and unprecedented second career--he made himself America's first catastrophic ex-president.

Since 1980, Carter has made himself the supporter and apologist of anti-American dictators.

He met with Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega in 1989 and lent his prestige to Sandinista-written election rules that disfavored the democratic opposition. Jeane Kirkpatrick noted at the time how bitter Carter was when the Sandinistas nevertheless lost. "You'd have thought," she said, "that a democrat would have been happy."

In 1994, Carter was off to North Korea, where he met Kim Il Sung and pronounced the vicious old mass murderer "vigorous and intelligent."

Earlier this year, Carter visited Cuba and delivered a jaw-dropping speech at the University of Havana. He credulously praised Cuba's "superb systems of health care and universal education" and accused the U.S. of imposing the death penalty in a discriminatory manner. He offered perfunctory criticism of Castro's dictatorship--and then hastily undercut his few decent words by shaking Castro's hand and grinning at him as soon as he finished his speech.

Carter's record on the Middle East is especially contemptible. Jay Nordlinger of National Review describes the first of Carter's many meetings with Yasser Arafat: He said, "When I bring up the [PLO] charter, you should not be concerned that I am biased. I am much more harsh with the Israelis." Arafat, for his part, complained about the Reagan administration's alleged "betrayals." Rosalynn Carter, who was taking notes for her husband, interjected, "You don't have to convince us!" which . . . "elicited gales of laughter all round."

What is worst about the Arafat story is not Carter's toadying to a tyrant and a murderer, but his willingness to undercut his own country in order to ingratiate himself. Carter took this disloyal behavior to an unprecedented extreme the following year, 1991, when the UN Security Council was debating a resolution to authorize the United States to use force to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Carter wrote a letter to the Security Council asking them to vote the resolution down.

The Nobel Committee audaciously cited Carter's eagerness to sabotage the foreign policy of his successors as a reason for his prize: "In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development."

Lest that be misunderstood, Gunnar Berge, the committee's chairman, commented at a press conference that Carter's prize "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. . . . It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States."

A patriotic American would indignantly refuse any foreign prize that came accompanied by insults to his country. But in Carter's character, patriotism has always taken a very distant back seat to vanity and malice. No prize can redeem his reputation--but this choice certainly mars the reputation of this prize.