Former US President Jimmy Carter says will travel to North Korea: Report

Carter, a Democrat who was president from 1977 to 1981, said he had spoken to Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt.-General HR McMaster, but so far has gotten a negative response.

Former US President Jimmy Carter said he will be willing to travel to North Korea on behalf of the Trump administration to help diffuse rising tensions, The New York Times reported on its website on Sunday.

Former US President Jimmy Carter after delivering a lecture on the eradication of the Guinea worm, at the House of Lords in London, Britain, in 2016. (Reuters)

“I would go, yes,” Carter, 93, told the Times when he was asked in an interview at his ranch house in Plains, Georgia whether it was time for another diplomatic mission and whether he would do so for President Donald Trump.

Carter, a Democrat who was president from 1977 to 1981, said he had spoken to Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt.-General HR McMaster, who is a friend, but so far has gotten a negative response.

“I told him that I was available if they ever need me,” the Times quoted Carter as saying.

Told that some in Washington were made nervous by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s war of words, Carter said “I’m afraid, too, of a situation.”

Describing the North Korean leader as “unpredictable,” Carter worried that if Kim thinks Trump will act against him, he could do something pre-emptive, the Times reported.

“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.

In the mid 1990s, Carter traveled to Pyongyang over the objections of President Bill Clinton, the Times report said, and struck a deal with Kim Il Sung, grandfather of the current leader.