We continue to reflect on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy with history professor Brad Simpson. Despite presiding over an administration that stood out for its successful championing of human rights elsewhere in the world, “in Southeast Asia, Carter really continued the policies of the Nixon and Ford administration,” particularly in Indonesia, which was at the time occupying and carrying out a genocide in East Timor. Simpson founded the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, which provided thousands of U.S. documents to East Timor’s Truth Commission in the aftermath of the Indonesian military’s mass killings of tens of thousands of Timorese civilians with U.S. arms under the dictatorial regime of President Suharto.
