Jimmy Carter death news: Jimmy Carter went to North Korea for nuclear talks in 1994. It didn’t go as planned

Jimmy Carter is known for brokering a famed peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But he may have also prevented a war between the United States and North Korea 30 years ago — in an act of unilateral diplomacy that deeply angered the Clinton White House, and created a breach between the two Democratic presidents. In the late spring of 1994, North Korea had announced it was throwing international nuclear inspectors out of the country, and U.S. intelligence agencies assessed it could be racing to produce a nuclear weapon. Inside the White House of President Bill Clinton, there was debate over whether military action might be required to stop it — and whether that could rekindle the Korean War.

Into this breach stepped Carter, who wrote a letter to Clinton saying he had decided to go to North Korea — as a private citizen — to meet with Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder. The letter was intercepted by Vice President Al Gore, who asked Carter, a fellow Southerner, to soften the tone and ask for Clinton’s blessing for the trip. It was given, but grudgingly.

Carter spent two days in the North, negotiating with the aging Kim and ultimately extracting what he thought were binding commitments from him to keep inspectors in the country and to gradually give up his nuclear fuel — in return for energy help from the West. The details were vague, but Carter returned across the Demilitarized Zone to Seoul, South Korea, and declared that the “nuclear crisis is over” and that his two days of talks with North Korea’s communist leader had been a “miracle.” (If Americans weren’t paying much attention, it may be because just as Carter was emerging from the North, O.J. Simpson was in a live-on-TV, slow-motion car chase as police tried to arrest him on suspicion of murder.)

It didn’t look that way to Clinton, who contradicted Carter and continued seeking sanctions against the North at the United Nations. To him and other Carter critics, the former president’s diplomacy seemed naive, appearing to uncritically accept everything that Kim Il Sung said.

When I met Carter days later in Tokyo, where he was visiting the American ambassador, Walter Mondale, who had served as his vice president, he had another version of events. He said he was trying to box in the “Great Leader,” as Kim was known, and get him to publicly declare the terms of a deal so that his aides would carry them out. When I asked Carter about the health of Kim, who had ruled over North Korea for more than four decades, he smiled and said he looked “terrific.” A few weeks later, Kim was dead. His son, Kim Jong Il, reached an accord of sorts with the Clinton White House, in which the West agreed to build two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors to produce electricity, in return for the end of the North’s bomb project. But the reactors were never completed, and a dozen years later North Korea conducted its first nuclear test. In retrospect, the meeting was the prelude, as it turned out, to President Donald Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, the grandson of the dictator who met Carter. Those summits failed, too, and today North Korea is estimated to have 60 or more nuclear weapons. But while Carter failed to disarm the North, he also defused a crisis that, had it triggered a war, would have changed America and Asia.