I'm over here trying to have a fun, hypothetical mind-game with arbitrary & made-up rules, and you've got to go and ruin it with "it's complicated" realities. :

I'm over here trying to have a fun, hypothetical mind-game with arbitrary & made-up rules, and you've got to go and ruin it with "it's complicated" realities. :-) But of course, you're correct. And Carter (and Nixon and Ford) obviously didn't have the foresight to realize the ultimate impact of the process/decision. Yet they would have been aware it was a major, influential policy decision. Does "starting the process" count as an ultimately-weighty-political-decision? Along the lines of "Deciding to drop the bomb on Hiroshima," if you want to count that as a decision by one person. Of course it was also just one node of a decision tree that was a long, complicated chain-of-events.