I'm torn on this issue.

North Korea is one of the greyest examples morality-wise when it comes to regime change.

Right now hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of citizens live in appalling conditions in work camps. Most of them are there because a relative did something the regime didn't like. They will all die prematurely after years of misery.

99% of the rest in North Korea live pretty poorly, but they scrape by.

So, you have a chance to give millions of people a better life and free hundreds of thousands from slavery, but it will cost hundreds of thousands of lives?

What is the ratio of misery to death that balances out?

I sure don't know. But, as much as I hate Trump and all those idiots, the idea of destroying the North Korean regime might just have merit. Especially if it's done before they develop their nuclear capabilities more.

So we kill some of those poor people to save them and educate them about democracy?

How well has this worked before, ever? Is there a recorded case of peoples lives improving based on superpower military intervention in regime change? Outside the ones aimed at keeping dictators in power, because those do tend to work well.

What are we going to do differently this time?

but at what cost? I've heard that any military action will result in 500,000 dead in Seoul and that's without even talking about the nukes

I have a very bad feeling that trump will try to keep his presidency by starting something with N. Korea

China holds the economic keys and put the most pressure on the N Korea. This should be Plan A, B, C D.

We don't need to be preemptive on N. Korea.
However if they launch an attack It would be logical to fight back.

How much to retaliate depends where they attack first.
If they go for Soul S Korea with12 Million people It would be logical to whip the shit out of the North leaders and army. Then let an UN govern the area until the area is re established

They hit Guam -- Same. but no invasion of UN or any other group.


This is a hornets nest and once poked it would be decades before peace peace is settle.

China will not allow Americans occupy N. Korea.
S Korea does not have the finance to "settle/ rebuild/ stabilize" an new government in the north.

China does not want a flood of hungry starving immigrants.

American don't need another money pit to fund.

Too bad no one can convince Trump of that. He's the one stating clearly and publicly that we'll act unilaterally and preemptively if there are more threats (followed immediately by another threat by lil' Kim), and he is also the one who suggests we'll use nukes in that preemptive strike.

Moving this video to lurgee's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

welcome to the epic battle of the narcissists!

where women...children and young men indoctrinated into the religion of nationalism, die in horrible and grotesque manners all to appease the bloated ego's of two sociopaths!!!!

coming to Netflix this fall!
don;t miss it!

It seems strange to argue that we need to protect the North Korean economy so that the people don't suffer..when they are suffering so horribly under their latest dictator and have been for decades. They don't need a better economy, they need regime change.

The moment to do that was a long time ago. Now the price to do that is far, far too high..yet we can see that the price of allowing a nuclear North Korea which can terrorize the world with nukes and sell them to terrorists is much higher still.

What do we do? I really don't know. I am praying for wisdom.

To be fair, we tried pretty damn hard to stop big Kim from grabbing control in the first place. The price ended up being too high for us (America) then (during the Korean war), and the expected cost of forced regime change today is much higher, multiple millions of lives and rising constantly as lil' Kim's arsenal rapidly grows.
The multifaceted fiasco that is N Korea may prove unsolvable, but our current course has a predictable, unacceptable outcome.
I agree we need leaders with wisdom....also restraint, intelligence, diplomacy, and a high level of comprehension of the situation as seen from multiple viewpoints. Sadly I don't see those qualities exemplified by either of the men who count most in this situation.

The only way this can be solved long-term is by treating the area as an investment opportunity. At the very least Japan, China, Russia, the US and South Korea would have to cooperate to make it happen.

South Korea would have to head the effort mainly because Koreans are incredibly xenophobic and nationalistic. Most North Koreans are actually proud to be successfull at enduring whatever hardships are thrown at them and believe foreigners are to blame for everything.

There would have to be a "Marshall plan" that would ensure that the general population, but also most local elites would keep or recover some form of ownership of their "property" which would mostly be land and housing and administration or military rank at this point.

In other words you would have to make the idea of change favourable for the population of North Korea, not try to scare them. Very difficult to organize, much more so than US healthcare.

Interesting theory.
It seems things are moving the other direction, though, with the new sanctions amounting to a halt on ALL investments.

That is how communism fell in Eastern Europe. The ruling elites realized that they would be better off if they just gave up on the ideology and kept their property. Everyone else was so poor by western standards that meaningful investments had to come from abroad, the ex-communists mostly just changed shirts and kept their social "leadership" roles. Reagan and Kohl just talked the talk, the important part was the willingness to give up power, that was how bad the economics of socialism were. Some people still remember socialism as if it was something awesome, a thing to be proud of. One time border guards celebrate anniversaries never pausing to think about the fact that for 40 years they were employed to stop people from LEAVING their country. THAT is a sure sign your country sucks.

The way some people have written about "destroying" North Korea, it would make you think that we haven't been talking about a weapon of mass destruction which would indiscriminately incinerate women, children, pets, and leave swathes of radioactive land uninhabitable which would then leak mutation/radioactivity into the rest of the world's ecosystem.

Western civilisation has surely succumbed to some kind of mental sickness, turning us all into mindless clones repeating "the greater good" when we get promised large, colourful explosions. When war after war ends in disaster and further misery, we continue to talk about "bringing an end to suffering" everywhere in the world as though it's both a duty, and something we haven't catastrophically screwed up time after time. Worse is the underlying pride in that perceived duty; "We're gonna make their lives better whether they want it or not! OORAHH!"

The moralising about whether or not they deserve it is an exercise in narcissistic god complexes, covered with a veneer of regret, "oh no, we should have gone to war years ago, now it's too late, should we? shouldn't we?" Like it's great fun to discuss whether or not people should burn and rot to death over the course of weeks, from the comfort of your breakfast table back in good ole metropolis.

And if you decide to bomb? Ah well, it had to be done. Yes, it's a terrible burden, the kind of pain that people burning to death will never understand or thank us for. But we'll continue, because we're the hero they need not the one they want.

Trump's handling of the NK situation is a perfect marriage of the worst elements of the usual neoliberal approach (pro- profit & power orientated) and the thuggish exaggerated threat approach favoured by teenagers in playgrounds.

Our own countries are in an absolute SHIT state. With our indifference towards global warming, the developed nations are the most dangerous threat to life on Earth for *every* country. Why do we still have the arrogance to go around discussing how to improve countries that we've never even fucking been to?