In an interview marked by conciliatory remarks regarding Donald Trump and his administration, Jimmy Carter said he was willing to travel to North Korea in an attempt to soften tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.

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Speaking to the New York Times mostly about foreign policy, the 93-year-old former president also said Trump was not solely to blame for damage to America’s world image.

“The media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” he said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

Trump has engaged in a war of words with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, often via Twitter and with liberal use of a mocking nickname, “Little Rocket Man”. The president has also undercut efforts by his secretary of state to talk to Pyongyang, repeatedly suggesting that only military action will work, and he used his maiden speech to the United Nations to threaten to “totally destroy” the country.

Carter, president between 1977 and 1981, spoke at his house in Plains, Georgia. On Saturday night, he joined the former presidents George HW Bush (1989-93), Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama (2009-2017) at a concert in College Station, Texas, to raise money for hurricane relief.

The Democrat has been active on the world stage since leaving the White House, via the not-for-profit Carter Center. In 1994, he went to Pyongyang and negotiated a short-lived deal to lessen tensions not resolved since the end of the Korean war in 1953. He also travelled to North Korea in 2010, to negotiate the release of an American held in the country, and again in 2011. Asked by the Times if he would go again, he said: “I would go, yes.”

He had spoken to the national security adviser, HR McMaster, he said, including at the funeral of his own such adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in May. He “told him that I was available if they ever need me” but had not been asked to go, he said.

Carter said he was “afraid” of nuclear conflict between the US and North Korea. “They want to save their regime [and have] 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 had indicated a willingness to talk peace with North Korea last month, according to an academic at the University of Georgia.

Trump has pressed China to help rein in Pyongyang but Carter said: “We greatly overestimate China’s influence on North Korea. Particularly to Kim.” The North Korean leader has “never, so far as I know, been to China”, Carter said. “And they have no relationship. Kim Jong-il [the current leader’s father] did go to China and was very close to them.”

Asked if Trump was responsible for souring America’s image in the world, he said: “He might be escalating it but I think that precedes Trump. The United States has been the dominant character in the whole world and now we’re not any more. And we’re not going to be. Russia’s coming back and India and China are coming forward.”



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In office, Carter presided over the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been assigned the task of achieving lasting Middle East peace.

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Carter suggested that might not be so unlikely an idea as many think, as “I’ve seen in the Arab world, including the Palestinian world, the high esteem that they pay to a member of one’s own family.” He also criticised Barack Obama’s record in Middle East policy and said he did not think Israel would ever permit a two-state solution.

Asked about investigations into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favour, Carter said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that what the Russians did changed enough votes, or any votes.” His wife, Rosalynn, disagreed.

Both voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, Carter said.

On other domestic matters, Carter was also conciliatory. Asked about debates over whether statues to Confederate leaders should come down and whether protesting black NFL players should stand for the national anthem, he agreed that Trump was “exacerbating” racial divisions.

“But maybe not deliberately,” he said.

To Carter, as the descendant of southern troops who fought at Gettysburg, he said, the issue of tearing down Confederate statues was “difficult … but I can understand African Americans’ aversion to [the statues] and I sympathize with them. I don’t have any objection to them being labelled with explanatory labels or that sort of thing.”

NFL players protesting against racial injustice and police brutality by kneeling, he said, “ought to find a different way to object, to demonstrate. I would rather see all the players stand during the American anthem.”