One can’t help but admire and disdain Jimmy Carter at the same time. Here’s a devout Christian committed to peace, non-violence and cooperation, noble causes to be sure, but at the expense of security and freedom? During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia Governor, declared Human Rights to be a hallmark of his foreign policy. That fixation came with a price, including a growing threat from radical Islam and a ruinous economy. Three decades later and Carter is no less fixated on that singular goal of peace at any price.

According to the former president, threatening North Korea will serve only to harden the tyrannical regime’s resolve leading to a full-scale nuclear confrontation. Carter’s remarks came on the heals of Secretary of State Rice’s appearance with Japanese Prime Minister Abe, at which time Rice declared that the US would use the full range of its capabilities to defend Japan. Apparently, in Carter’s mind, a pledge to defend Japan can be regarded as bullying or threatening to North Korea. Perhaps Carter would have been satisfied had Rice stated that the US would do nothing to support Japan if that nation is threatened or attacked. If anything Carter should be praising the Secretary of State, her message to Japan was designed to scuttle rumblings in Japan over whether or not that nation should go nuclear, which they should.

Japan, unlike the United States, is far more at risk, should the bellicose Kim Jong Il fall off his meds. Carter’s words of wisdom serve only to placate an aggressor, just as Chamberlains word’s did at Munich.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
-Patrick Henry

For some Americans, including Carter, life IS so dear and peace IS so sweet to the point that living in fear is an acceptable consequence. Such a philosophy, however, cannot become the hallmark of US foreign policy. Carter’s mission of appeasement in 1994 underscores the failures of such policies, as if the lessons of WWII and countless other examples had not already opened our eyes to the fallacy of appeasement. In Carter’s mind the 1994 agreement with North Korea was sound and it was the Bush administration who precipitated the nuclear crisis. To make such an argument, is to ignore the fact that North Korea disregarded that 1994 agreement from the start and went ahead with its nuclear program in secret, revealing it to the United States in 2002. This effort was done because the US revealed itself to be weak and unwilling to stand up to then tyrant Kim Il Sung, not because of US policy.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/18/america/NA_GEN_US_Korea_Carter.php