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Alternative headline: Man who presided over Iran hostage crisis offers to solve North Korean tensions.

Jimmy Carter is injecting himself in politics once again, a surprising move for someone whose first presidential term resulted in 44 states voting against a second term.

As President Donald Trump’s rhetoric against the North Korean regime has escelated, Carter has reportedly said that he’d be willing to meet Kim Jong-un to resolve tensions over their nuclear and missile programs, and bring “permanent peace” to the Korean peninsula.

According to the Guardian:

Jimmy Carter has reportedly said he is willing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in a bid to defuse tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes, and bring “permanent peace” to the Korean peninsula.

“Should former president Carter be able to visit North Korea, he would like to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and discuss a peace treaty between the United States and the North, and a complete denuclearisation of North Korea,” Park Han-shik, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, told South Korea’s JoongAng Daily newspaper.

Park said Carter told him during a meeting at his home in Georgia at the end of September that he wanted to “contribute toward establishing a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula.

Carter’s recent comments on North Korea have angered the White House, which last month reportedly asked him not to speak publicly about the crisis amid fears he was undermining Trump, who refuses to entertain any form of rapprochement with the regime.

Media reports said a senior US state department official had visited Carter at his home to pass on Trump’s request.

Assuming a treaty with North Korea was something Carter could accomplish, it likely wouldn’t be worth the paper printed on. The UN has already passed eight major sanction resolutions on North Korea in response to the nation’s nuclear and missile activities since 2006, and what reaction has that garnered? None — the regime simply ignored them.

We imagine any negotiations between Carter and Jong-un would go about as well as Harry Ellis’ attempts to negotiate with Hans Gruber (played by the late Alan Rickman) in Die Hard.

[Note: This post was written by Matt Palumbo. He is a co-author of the new book A Paradoxical Alliance: Islam and the Left, and can be found on Twitter @MattPalumbo12]