Jimmy Carter Isn’t Going to Fix This

Last week former President Jimmy Carter said that he was ready and willing for President Trump to call on him to help ease tensions with North Korea. My first question is:

Was Dennis Rodman unavailable?

If they wrote a book about making peace in the last century it could be titled “Things That Didn’t Work”, Carter would easily warrant his own chapter. On a major diplomatic incident or crisis, no one has ever said “Thank god Jimmy Carter is here to fix this” (except maybe sarcastically). Carter’s diplomacy seems to stem from a view of humanity that has a childlike quality to it: The kind of child who keeps getting into vans with “free candy” painted on the side.

Carter’s last contribution to peace anywhere was the Israel-Egypt peace treaty but the post Yom Kippur war political situation means that Carter shares much of the credit for that deal with serendipity. There are also plenty of accounts that point to the US team seemingly doing everything in their power to derail the deal.

Since then, his efforts at helping along peace in the Middle East has produced nothing besides for a book that was so flawed as to cause one of his chief Middle East advisers to resign, citing that the book was “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.”

Almost at the same time that Carter was busy not screwing up the Israel-Egypt peace accord, he was busy screwing up the US response to the Iranian revolution . Following the violent overthrow of the pro-American shah by a regime that was openly hostile to the US, Carter still perplexingly predicted that “ Khomeinism would become “A model of humane government”. He could almost be forgiven for such an obviously wrong statement considering that his diplomatic staff was just as delusional. Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations referred to Khomeini as a “Twentieth Century Saint” while the American Ambassador to Iran referred to one of the fathers of modern terrorism as “a Gandhi-like Figure”.

You could almost believe that the Ayatollahs have been deliberately trying to prove them all wrong since then.

So this brings us to North Korea: what does he think he’s going to accomplish? Here, once again, his optimism that this van actually has candy in it, is fueled by illusions of past performances. In 1994, on the brink of open conflict with North Korea, Carter was dispatched by President Clinton to open a channel with Kim Il Sung; Carter proceeded to overstep his authority and rope the Clinton administration into a deal that it hadn’t never planned on offering. Clinton was reportedly furious at Carter when he heard about the negotiations.

The North Koreans got 5 billion in aid and two reactors in exchange for promises not to build nuclear weapons. At the conclusion of the deal, Carter hugged the North Korean leader and called the results “a good omen”. For who? Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize for the effort, but it seems like they’ve been giving those out ironically for the last few decades. It certainly wasn’t a good omen for North Koreans; for someone who claims to be a humanitarian he has seemed surprisingly unconcerned with the fate of the actual North Korean people.

But that may also be fueled be part of a worldview on foreign policy that has long ago departed reality. On his last trip to Israel, he was shunned by nearly the entire Israeli government, which prompted this gem of diplomatic “wisdom”:

“In a democracy, I realize you don’t need to talk to the top leader to know how the country feels, when I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator, because he speaks for all the people.”

The idea that that Kim Jong Un speaks for the people of North Korea is ridiculous, If KJU spoke for the average North Korean the only thing he’d have to say is “I’m hungry”. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian have more to say on behalf of the American people than KJU does of his own.

Perhaps Carter still has a bitter aftertaste from his last encounter with “the people” getting voted out of office by 44 states.

So here were are again: same problem, new bowl cut megalomaniac, and who wants to come to the rescue? The guy that, by many accounts, helped get us into this mess in the first place. In spite of Carter’s feelings that the last deal was a good Omen, we know now that the regime in Pyongyang started violating the deal before the ink was even dry. That kind of “good omen” diplomacy is the last thing we need now.

Not sending Carter to North Korea is probably one of his most def diplomatic decisions. I say Trump should send him only on the condition that the North Koreans agree to keep him. We may not know the solution to this current problem, but we can safely say that Jimmy Carter isn’t the answer.

(Seriously, someone try Dennis Rodman’s cell again please).