The former U.S. president was on a self-assigned peace mission to North Korea, hoping to resolve a nuclear dispute that could yet lead to war. In two days of talks, he extracted assurances from Kim about freezing his nuclear program and submitting to continued international inspection. Carter took it upon himself to promise that the United States would drop its efforts to impose sanctions on North Korea. He concluded his missionary work by embracing the 82-year-old strongman. Then, crossing the border to Seoul, he announced that Kim had agreed to meet his South Korean counterpart, President Kim Young Sam – the first such meeting since Korea was cut in two 49 years ago.
But what else, if anything, did Carter actually accomplish? It wasn’t clear yet whether Kim’s concessions would be enough to resolve the long stalemate over United Nations inspection of his nuclear facilities. Skeptics thought the North Korean leader was simply stringing Carter along in order to buy time for his bomb-building program. ““We are dealing here with a guy who is capable of the big lie,’’ said an American official, ““and it’s possible he just took in a former president of the United States as his stooge.''
Still, Carter’s mediation caused sighs of relief in South Korea and in neighboring countries like China and Japan, which have no desire for a showdown with Pyongyang (box, page 40). War jitters have spread around the world; in the latest Newsweek Poll, 61 percent of the Americans surveyed said a conflict between the United States and North Ko-rea is ““somewhat likely’’ or ““very likely.’’ Carter’s initiative seemed to ease the tension. ““You can’t dismiss this,’’ said a Western diplomat in the region. ““This is an opportunity, possibly a big one. The whole diplomatic terrain out here just shifted.''
If so, it was a shift the Clinton administration did nothing to engineer. Carter and Bill Clinton have never been close. The new administration has annoyed the ex-president by taking pains to avoid any connection with what it regards as the more wishy-washy aspects of the Carter era. And Carter has complained that George Bush kept him more up-to-date on foreign policy than Clinton does, despite the fact that many current top officials – including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and national-security adviser Anthony Lake – are Carter administration alumni. The trip to North Korea was Carter’s idea; he said Kim had been trying to lure him to Pyongyang since 1991. Clinton’s advisers briefed Carter on the nuclear issue, but they did not give him any message to carry to Kim, as they did when evangelist Billy Graham visited North Korea last February. Nor could they arrange for secure communications with Carter while he was in the North.
The administration blew its collective top when Carter seemed to assure Kim that Washington had given up its campaign for an embargo on North Korea. ““I would like to inform you that they have stopped the sanctions activity in the United Nations,’’ he told the dictator, in remarks taped by CNN. ““Our position has not changed,’’ Clinton told reporters in Chicago. Fumed a White House aide, ““Carter misstated . . . He didn’t know what he was talking about.’’ Later, at a press conference in Seoul, Carter said he merely told Kim the sanctions effort would be ““put in abeyance’’ if the North Korean leader kept his promises. But he also said he thought sanctions would be ““counterproductive’’ and ““an insult’’ that North Korea could not ignore.
Carter’s insistence on making that contrarian point confirmed the belief of some administration officials that he was a loose cannon who should not be allowed to influence policy. ““Let’s get it straight,’’ said one aide during a confusing conversation over which president had said what. ““It’s President Clinton and Mister Carter.’’ The administration planned to debrief Carter early this week. ““We look forward to his re-entry to this planet,’’ said a peeved State Department official, ““so he can sit down and tell us what actually did happen.''
Carter takes a deeply personal approach to diplomacy. A born-again Christian, he believes problems of state can be solved by winning people’s hearts. ““He has a tendency to try to cut through difficult and very complex problems by reaching out to try to understand the other side,’’ says Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a high-ranking official in Carter’s State Department. That approach worked brilliantly at Camp David, where Carter’s relentless idealism pushed Egypt and Israel into a peace accord that neither side thought possible to begin with. Many thought he should have shared the Nobel Peace Prize that was subsequently awarded to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. His personal touch was less successful with the hard-boiled leaders of the Soviet Union. At the Vienna summit in 1979, Carter embraced Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev after the two men signed the SALT II accord. But Brezhnev proved to be no soulmate; a few months later, the Soviets put detente on hold and invaded Afghanistan.
Kim II Sung is made of even sterner stuff. Over the years he ordered the invasion of South Korea, the capture of the U.S. surveillance ship Pueblo and the murder of several South Korean cabinet ministers. ““Kim is an old guerrilla fighter,’’ says a State Department official. ““His basic instinct is survival: the only way to keep the big guys off you is by bobbing and weaving.’’ Some of Kim’s fanciest footwork has come on the nuclear issue. Insisting that he doesn’t have nuclear weapons and doesn’t plan to build them, he nonetheless refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to thoroughly inspect his nuclear facility at Yongbyon. The possibility that North Korea might have the bomb has given his decrepit country far more influence in the world than it otherwise deserves. Meanwhile, Kim parries threats with threats of his own. He has warned that sanctions against his country would be a declaration of war. And last week his government quit the IAEA, declaring that the two agency inspectors remaining in North Korea ““now will have nothing further to do in our country.''
Bill Clinton tried to make it clear what he wanted from Kim. He announced last Thursday that Washington might be willing to resume direct talks with Pyongyang if North Korea would ““genuinely and verifiably freeze its nuclear program,’’ allow the inspectors to remain and comply with the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci read the statement to Carter over the telephone. ““I read it to him twice,’’ Gallucci said later. ““Twice. There was no ambiguity there.''
That didn’t stop Kim from blowing smoke. He told Carter the inspectors could stay, offering the utterly improbable explanation that he didn’t know they’d been ordered out. Reviving an old negotiating gambit, he said he wanted to replace his present reactor with a light-water model that is less useful for making bombs. That might be a helpful step in the long run, but it fudged the more immediate question of whether North Korea is extracting weapons-grade plutonium from its current reactor. Carter said later that he found Kim ““quite reasonable’’ on the nuclear issue. But when the former president repeated Kim’s assertions about the inspectors and the light-water technology in an interview on CNN, Gallucci sputtered: ““That seems. . . with all due respect, ludicrous.''
The administration was more impressed with Kim’s offer to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for renewed talks with Washington. ““This is something we have not heard from Kim before,’’ said a senior U.S. official. None of Clinton’s advisers argue for military action against North Korea. But they won’t know whether a diplomatic solution is possible until they hear the freeze offer repeated, in much more detail, through official channels. They also were encouraged that Kim didn’t actually expel the inspectors or withdraw from the NPT. ““He has left himself some wiggle room,’’ said one U.S. analyst. ““The Carter trip, for all its confusion, tells us that this problem is still negotiable.’’ But from here on, it will have to be negotiated by governments; the drawback to using a private citizen as an intermediary is that almost anything can be disavowed. The official follow-through will determine the success or failure of Carter’s mission. ““If [the North Koreans] intend to find a face-saving way to extricate themselves, then Carter will look very astute,’’ said a Clinton aide. ““If the visit was a stalling tactic, then he was used.’’ On that scorecard, good intentions count for nothing.
