“He had a certain level of principle, a certain level of logic, and if you didn’t get it, that was it,” John Gans, a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation who served as Mr. Carter’s chief speechwriter, said in a phone interview. “There was an engine at the top of his head that was totally different than you or me.”
Mr. Carter clashed with other members of the cabinet over the renewed threat posed by Russia, at a time when many experts inside and outside the government still held out hope for better relations. Among his first steps as secretary was to increase America’s military presence across six former Soviet bloc states, including the Baltic countries.
“We do not seek a cold, let alone a hot, war with Russia,” he told reporters in 2015. “But make no mistake, the United States will defend out interests and our allies, the principled international order and the positive future it affords us all.”
He believed in the importance of hard power — America’s ability to use its military prowess to shape global politics — a position that also sometimes put him in tension with others in the Obama White House. In 2015, he announced that in the face of Chinese encroachment into the South China Sea, the United States would “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”
That statement was stronger than some in the administration would have liked, but it has since won bipartisan support and become a cornerstone of America’s new, more hard-edged policy toward China.
Still, Mr. Carter and Mr. Obama agreed on the big things: the need to shift America’s geostrategic focus to Asia, upgrade the American military’s technological prowess and bring equity to the armed services.
In January 2016, after a three-year review, Mr. Carter ordered that all positions within the military, including combat roles, be open to women. Six months later, he ordered that openly transgender people be allowed to serve, a directive that President Donald J. Trump later rescinded.
