Plan B Forum

Carter volunteers to help solve tensions with North Korea



Former President Jimmy Carter says he is open to working with President Trump to solve the growing tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.

In an interview with The New York Times' Maureen Dowd, Carter said he would go to the country to work on negotiations.

“I would go, yes,” Carter said. He pointed to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's unpredictability as a major reason why diplomacy was so necessary.

“I’m afraid, too, of a situation,” he continues. “I don’t know what they’ll do. Because they want to save their regime. And we greatly overestimate China’s influence on North Korea. Particularly to Kim Jong-un. He’s never, so far as I know, been to China.”

Despite efforts from the Obama administration and the Trump administration to pressure North Korea, the country has held several major weapons tests in recent months. Carter said that North Korea's evolving technology makes the problem more pressing than ever.

“I think he’s now got advanced nuclear weaponry that can destroy the Korean Peninsula and Japan, and some of our outlying territories in the Pacific, maybe even our mainland,” Carter said.

Carter also said he's let Trump's national security adviser H.R. McMaster know that he is "available" if they need a diplomatic envoy to North Korea.[Yeah, you sit by your phone waiting for that call Cornpone...]

“I told him that I was available if they ever need me,” Carter told the paper.

Carter's comments come weeks after it was reported by a South Korean newspaper that he had volunteered to meet with Kim Jong-un.

“Should former President Carter be able to visit North Korea, he would like to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and discuss a peace treaty between the United States and the North and a complete denuclearization of North Korea,” a University of Georgia professor who spoke with Carter told the paper.

4. 'I think the media have been harder on Trump'

It appears that Carter defended Trump a few times during the interview.

Carter said Trump's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn't bother him.

"At the Carter Center," he told the Times, "we deal with Putin and the Russians quite frequently concerning Syria."

He praised Trump for taking the initiative to reach out to Saudi Arabia and said the President has been under a stricter spotlight than his predecessors.

"I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I've known about," Carter replied. "I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation."[With good reason, you butt-licking moron]

But he said that Trump was deepening racial divisions in the US.

"Yes, I think he is exacerbating it," he said. "But maybe not deliberately."

Big RR wrote:Well Jim he's getting up in years, so it had to happen, he's losing it (or in your case he's losing what little he had. I was first going to say he couldn't do much worse than Trump has done with NK, but those comments show me he has likely lost his grip on reality.

Big RR wrote:True, and he also is only the envoy of the president he is representing. These are not his personal North Korean policies, but what Carter can do reasonably well is to present them in a way that the other side has to listen and consider them. He showed this ability with getting the Camp David Accords finalized and in a number of other situations.

My comment was directed toward his defense of Trump; the media have been harder on Trump than any other president? Please. Carter is divorced from reality; I'll admit he's not being treated any better, but likewise he is not being treated any worse.

Big RR wrote:I honestly don't know what can be negotiated (nor do I know why NK would want to negotiate when they see how we honor previous agreements dealing with nuclear technology--namely Iran), but I do know name calling and threats are not the way to deal with this situation, nor is military action. Broad based economic sanctions are one alternative, but that would mean we would have to try and put together a group of countries that would cooperate with us--unlikely with the current White House occupant trying his best to isult and piss off every other country's leaders.

rubato wrote:It may be surprising but NK has one of the largest submarine fleets in the world. They are diesel-electric and obsolete compared to the US. We should just sink every one of them that leaves port and say not a word about it while their anxiety mounts.


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rubato

Big RR wrote:If I recall, however, the diesel electric subs must surface (or at least almost surface) fairly often to recharge their batteries and thus would be easier to track than nuclear subs. I know battery technology is getting better, but if these are older subs, I doubt they have a very long submerged time (a few days at best).

rubato wrote:I would vote for our ability to track and sink them over NKs ability to hide. I believe we also use thermal and other methods of tracking

Scooter wrote:There was some international relations analyst I heard a few months ago who stated plainly what the stakes are - there is no foreseeable resolution in North Korea that doesn't involve the incineration of 10 million people in Seoul.