Woodrow Wilson, the 28th U.S. president, led America through World War I and crafted the Versailles Treaty's "Fourteen Points," the last of which was creating a League of Nations to ensure world peace. Central to Carter’s foreign policy was the worldwide support of human rights and the protection of “individual[s] from the arbitrary power of the state.” Carter hoped that the United States would regain the Wilsonian moral high ground that it had lost with the Vietnam War and Nixon’s amoral Realpolitik, and entailed a distancing of America from right-wing dictatorships as well as a cooling of US’s foreign relations with China and the Soviet Union.

From a pragmatic view, Carter's human rights policy complicated foreign relations. It entailed a distancing of America from right-wing dictatorships and a cooling of relations between the U.S. and China and Soviet Union in the short run, while implicitly led to Soviet's communist advances in the Third World, the Soviet Union's ambitious armaments programs, and invasion to Afghanistan. However, it can be considered the most impressive Legacy of the Carter Administration. 

Catalyzed by Carter's loosening containment policies, the ambitious Soviet Union dragged itself out of the detente relations into the abyss of an amoral stance antithetical with the world's appeal for peace. The Soviet Union aggressively supported the spread of communism in the Third World, especially in South Yemen and Ethiopia. While none of these developments alone was particularly threatening to the West, together they seemed to create an alarming communist trend in world politics. Soviet's subsequent invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s was and development of nuclear arsenals also sprang up worldwide anti-Soviet fears. 

Moreover, the human rights foreign policy can be seen as a buffering agent that left room for the hard-line president Ronald Reagan to fight back. After Carter declared the collapse of detente, Ronald Reagan moved beyond containment and into the long-term strategic offensive. Dominantly, there are two brilliant strategies: American's massive national defense build-up and assistance to Afghanistan. The former led Soviet Union to increase its GDP three fold that of the USA's, and the latter cost the Soviet Union 8 times as much, increasing economic disparity that finally led to the dissolution of Soviet Union. What's considered the greatest political success during Carter's administration is the Camp David Accords he negotiated. He brought together Israel, a Jewish state in the Middle East, and Egypt, a huge country in Northeast Africa. Accordingly, Egypt became the first country in the Middle East to recognize the legitimacy of Israel, and peace in the Middle East. However, regarding Egypt’s formal recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a betrayal, the Arab League suspended its membership until 1989. During his presidency, other countries' violation of diplomatic immunity was indicative of the international image of the United States as a “paper tiger.” 

Apart from his human rights policy, in September 1984, the Carter Administration led a Habitat for Humanity work group to New York, serving 19 families in need of safe, affordable housing, named the Carter Work Project, which is now a weeklong event taking place in a different location all over the world each year. Throughout their involvement, President and Mrs. Carter have worked alongside 103,000 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate and repair 4,331 homes. Their attitude and commitment conveyed the firm stance on morality and human rights that will be implicitly boosting the ethos of American society in the technological era.

In conclusion, dominant evaluations for Carter’s human rights policies are negative in that it indeed complicated U.S.’s foreign relations and did not achieve the Wilsonian moral high ground Carter wished to attain, but I contend it a temporary threat and a long-standing glory, given its concession that damaged Soviet’s international prestige, justified Ronald Reagan’s counterattack, and imperceptible influence on American ethos that lasts until today.