How to pull back from the brink
By Wolf Blitzer
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize, former President Jimmy Carter is at it again. Writing Tuesday in The Washington Post, Carter offered some suggestions to try to ease the nuclear tensions between the United States and North Korea.
In the process, though, he seemed to hammer the Bush administration for contributing to this current crisis. "The Bush Administration," he writes, "brought a change in relationship with both Koreas."
Carter refers to several actions taken in Washington over the past year. "Rejection of the 'sunshine policy,' which had earned the Nobel Peace Prize for South Korean President Kim Dae-jung; announcements that North Korea, like Iraq and Iran, was part of an 'axis of evil'; public statements that the new 'Great Leader' was loathed as a 'pygmy' who deliberately starved his own people, that America was prepared to fight two wars at the same time, and that our missile defense system was a shield against North Korea -- all this helped cause many in that country to assume that they were next on America's hit list after Iraq."
Administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have said for weeks that those criticisms were unfair. They have noted that the North Koreans began cheating on their earlier commitments long before the president spoke of an "axis of evil."
The former president also blasted North Korea for its actions, including its abandoning of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. And he suggested that all the parties agree to a new forum -- perhaps in China or Russia -- to come up with a resolution. He said the parties should agree to the 1994 framework that he helped facilitate.
But Secretary Powell says those 1994 principles are not necessarily the way to go now. In an interview published in The Wall Street Journal, Powell says that agreement "left intact the capacity" for North Korea to continue developing nuclear weapons. "I think, therefore, that we need a new arrangement and not just go back to the existing framework."
The question before the Bush administration, the communist regime of North Korea, the democratic government in South Korea and the other key players in this crisis -- China, Japan and Russia -- is how to step back from the nuclear brink. That is a formidable challenge with huge repercussions for the world.
One thing appears clear in the process: The Bush White House is unlikely to call on Jimmy Carter to step in to try to ease the crisis.
