While visiting City Hall the other day, Jimmy Carter volunteered that, if asked, he’d be more than happy to go back to North Korea to defuse Pyongyang’s nuclear saber-rattling.
“I’ve been there three times so far,” said Carter. “But I never have been unless North Korea asked me to come and I got approval from the White House. If that should happen, I would be glad to go back.”
And the Nobel Peace Prize winner proceeded to make his case for why Barack Obama and Kim Jong Un should do precisely that. “I know the people there very well,” he said. “I’ve spent dozens of hours talking to them. I think what they want is a peace agreement with the United States.”
We don’t doubt that Carter has credibility with North Korea. Because few people outside that nation’s Communist regime have done more to abet its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Back in 1994, Carter appointed himself peacemaker, flew to Pyongyang — and effectively undercut then-President Clinton’s push for tougher sanctions by offering North Korea a sweetheart deal in return for a promise to freeze its weapons program.
While others hailed him for his “peacemaking,” this page described him as the classic “useful idiot.” All Carter had done, we wrote, was allow Kim Il Sung (the current leader’s grandfather) to “buy time in order to keep building nuclear weapons.”
Nearly twenty years later, our editorial stands up pretty well. So if President Obama wishes to take Carter up on his offer by sending him back to Pyongyang, we’d say go for it — so long as it’s a one-way ticket.