Jimmy Carter offers to visit North Korea to try to break nuclear stalemate
By CARLA MARINUCCI 03/07/2019 06:49 PM EST Updated 03/07/2019 07:31 PM EST
Excerpt:
SAN FRANCISCO — Former President Jimmy Carter — who once brokered a nuclear agreement with Kim Jong Un’s grandfather in the 1990s — is offering to travel to North Korea to try and break President Donald Trump's deadlock with the North Korean dictator.
The offer was described to POLITICO by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who met with the former president in Atlanta on Thursday.
In 1994, Carter became the first U.S. president ever to visit North Korea when he met with Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea and grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong Un. Together, the two developed a bilateral, “step-by-step plan to get to the point of peace and work toward denuclearization,’’ Khanna said.
Carter, now 94, no longer travels but told Khanna that he would go to North Korea if the Trump administration wanted his assistance. Khanna noted that Carter is “perhaps the only person in the nation” who had direct contact and negotiations with Kim’s grandfather, a revered figure in North Korea. And with that “weight of history," he added, Carter may be in a unique position to assist Trump in his nuclear talks with the current North Korean dictator after the two leaders left a recent summit in Vietnam with no agreement on how to move forward.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/07/jimmy-carter-north-korea-1210723
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He was the ideal ambassador because, as a nuclear physicist, he understood the issues - and as a diplomat, he understood the one thing they wanted, respect, and he was willing to give them that. The agreement continued successfully with Kim Il-sung's son, Kim Jong-il, and Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright. When George Bush* was selected in 2000, Kim Jong-il asked if he couldn't continue dealing with Albright. It finally fell apart in 2002 when Bush* included North Korea in his "Axis of Evil" and relations have deteriorated ever since. Having dealt with sensitive elections and regimes all over the world, President Carter understands people - and the issues - and he also negotiated the release of an American, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who was sentenced to 8 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korea, in 2010.
