Explain the causes of 1970s stagflation and the energy crisis, and describe Carter's foreign policy achievements alongside the Iran Hostage Crisis.
The 1970s brought a confusing new economic problem: stagflation, the simultaneous combination of high inflation, high unemployment, and stagnant growth, which defied the standard assumption that inflation and unemployment normally moved in opposite directions. In 1973, Arab oil-producing nations imposed an embargo in response to U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, quadrupling oil prices and producing long lines at American gas stations; President Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" campaign, complete with WIN buttons, largely failed to address the underlying problem and became something of a punchline. Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976 partly as a trustworthy outsider in Watergate's aftermath, achieved a genuine diplomatic breakthrough by personally brokering the Camp David Accords (1978), a lasting peace agreement between Egypt and Israel -- but struggled to master the domestic economy, and in a candid July 1979 televised address, popularly if inaccurately remembered as the "malaise speech," spoke of a national "crisis of confidence," a speech some praised as honest and others criticized as politically damaging for a sitting president to give.
Foreign crises compounded Carter's difficulties. In November 1979, following the Iranian Revolution that had overthrown the U.S.-backed Shah, Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days; an April 1980 military rescue attempt failed disastrously, and the hostages were not released until the very day Carter left office in January 1981. The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 further darkened the decade's outlook, prompting a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and a return to Cold War tension after the previous decade's partial thaw. Taken together, the oil shocks, stagflation, and the hostage crisis left many Americans by 1980 feeling their government could neither manage the economy nor project strength abroad -- a mood the next election would channel dramatically.
Mastery looks like: They can explain stagflation and the oil embargo's cause and effect, and describe both Carter's Camp David achievement and the Iran Hostage Crisis's outcome.
Common stumbles: Judging Carter's presidency by only its domestic struggles or only its foreign policy successes, rather than weighing both fairly.