We all see and hear what goes on over there. Kim will execute kids if they don’t cheer hard enough at his birthday party or something? He’s always threatening to nuke countries and is probably has the highest domestic kill count out of any world leader today.
So I ask? Why don’t any other countries step in to help those people. I saw a survey asking Americans and Escaped North Koreans would they migrate to North Korea and to the US if given the chance (hypothetical for the refugees). And it was like <0.1% to 95%. Obviously those people live in terror.
Why do we just allow this to happen in modern civilization? Nukes on South Korea? Is just not lucrative to step in? SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE!?
Because China.
China sees NK as a buffer to the US, sort of a little brother that’s a bit too crazy so they have to tug on the leash to get them to chill every now and then.
We’ve already got bases in SK, but the Yellow sea separates us from China. NK is the land barrier.
Generally countries in the west only get involved in conflicts if they get something out of it, be it directly via getting wealth from the country, or indirectly like curbing successful non-capitalistic economies before they catch on and their own people start questioning the billionaires. The “we’re there to liberate people” is just marketing speech.
I wonder why you say “countries in the west” and not just “countries”. It’s not like, I don’t know, Banín is shouting about North Korea every day and nobody listens.
I don’t know enough about how the rest of the world runs to generalise further
The US has invested a lot in its capacity to police the world (just look at how many bases we have around the world). So it’s logical to ask why the US would or wouldn’t police something. And usually before the US polices something with force, they start talking about it publicly.
Benin has no such capacity or intentions and so neither polices anything nor telegraphs its opinions.
Seoul is so close to the border, it’s within artillery range of NK. Kim can cause all kinds of havoc without resorting to nukes. If provoked enough, he could put one (or more) craters in South Korea’s largest city, without even playing his scariest card.
Then there’s the possibility of a military response from China. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that.
Lastly, NK has been under all kinds of sanctions for years. It might not be the “anything” you have in mind, but many nations seem to be doing about as much as they can without risking all-out war.
Because China doesn’t want anyone to.
It’s a whole ocean away which means you are not allowed to invade. And decades of sanctions make it hard for diplomacy.
One thing I have not seen brought up yet is that Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. Even if North Korea didn’t have nukes they could bombard the city with conventional arms or even chemical weapons and kill hundreds of thousands in the first day or two.
Can’t do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.
Ah, the old question about what to do about North Korea, it occupies the minds of many, there are some answers, many lead to more questions, and so on.
The stakes are increadibly high, so we have to tread very carefully.
Let’s bring up a few key facts.
- NK is a totalitarian state with a huge personality cult surrounding the Kim family.
- NK is supported by both China and Russia, they both have a highly vested interest in keeping the status quo.
- NK is located within artillery range of SK’s capital city, Seoul.
- NK’s society is vastly different from all of it’s neighbours, even the language used in NK is noticably different from the language spoken in SK.
- NK has nuclear weapons.
- NK does not have a problem ignoring the normal rules of diplomacy.
Now, you ask what other countries can do to help the people of NK, that is a hugely complicated question, which in general is mostly answered with an answer no one really wants to hear:
Support the current regime
For any proper aid to get into NK you need the support of the regime, and they will take the credit for the aid.
I saw a documentary of a film crew following a team of surgeons travelling to NK to help people who had lost their sight, it was a simple operation, preformed and funded by foreign organizations, the regime had only allowed the team access.
The operation took maybe a few min per patient, they replaced a lens in the eyes of the patient, and as soon as the patient was done, they rushed to the portraits of the leaders of NK, got on their knees and thanked them deeply for their graciousness of restoring their eyesight.
This is the kind of society NK is, everything is tied to the leader.
This is the starting point, and you have 26 million people to deal with…
Ok, say that a world power decide that they have had enough with the Kim family and this is worth going to war over.
What can we expect?
Regardless of what countries are involved, Seoul WILL be bombarded.
So now the attacker is hated both in NK and SK as well as probably a lot of other countries.
NK will use their nukes, and possibly other WMD they have.
Then comes China…
China loves NK as a buffer against the west, so they would and have deployed the PLA to save NK.
I fell asleep a few times while writing the pervious comment, so if it seems cut off, that is why.
Now, there are a few more things to talk about.
- What is more likely with regards to real change, military action by a foreign power, political collapse, or a gradual change?
- What will have to be done after thing have changed?
Lets start with 1 first:
I think we can rule out direct military action by a foreign power, any action will see Seoul in SK destroyed within a day, and even Japan is at a high risk here.
Political collapse is possible, but not realistic to happen in the current situation, remember that the government has an extreme level of control over the media in NK, this includes extreme control over the smartphones sold in NK, everything you do is monitored, any photo you take with the camera is cryptographically signed on the device so the government knows the origin of any photo spread around in NK, you can see more here: https://youtu.be/czJaA0S2AjE . With this level of control of the media, the regime will probably not fall soon.
Gradual change is the most probable, but will take a long time, people in SK do send baloons with USB sticks containing SK media, so people in NK are somewhat aware of life in SK. But as I noted earlier this will take a long time.
Ok lets move on to number 2, what would happen after a collapse of the NK government.
The most probable thing is that China will come and run NK as a kind of colony, NK lacks a LOT of modern infrastructure, and the citizens will be at extreme risk of exploitation.
Whoever colonized NK would face the daunting challenge of integrating 26 million people into a modern society, meanwhile other groups will try to exploit the cheap labour NK citizens can provide.
Bringing NK citizens into modern society with zero oversight will end in disaster, look at Albania as a warning, there was little knowledge of financial scams in the times after communism and several pyramid schemes was established and later collapsed, wiping out 50% of the GDP of Albania at the time and contributed in large parts to the 1997 Albanian rebellion.
Teaching the NK citizens about the dangers and advantages of modern society will take a long time, it will involve a lot of shattered illusions, plenty of people will want to go back their old ways, other’s will want to go full steam ahead, making their own paths without help.
This is just a small taste of the issues to come…
Great clarification. Do you think lifting sanctions and creating Pro-NK surpluses would help? Would Kim even do that?
The main problem with NK is the lack of trust and respect between them and the rest of the world, they don’t respect the rules of other nations (look at the NK kidnappings of Japanese citizens), this makes it very difficult to deal with them.
So trust and respect needs to be built up from the ground up.
As it stands now, even small lifted sanctions should be expected to be exploited by NK.
To start work to handle NK, the world could start by involving NK in talks, generic talks, acknowledging their existence outside of just conflicts and mandatory communications.
Talking will lead to better understanding which we can use to slowly try and lift some sanctions, and working from that angle.
Nukes baby!
Who knew nukes would be terrible for human rights? /s
But it is great for a country’s sovereignity
China is the answer. Nobody does anything about North Korea for the same reason China doesn’t invade Taiwan.
And this goes back to the Cold War, which goes back to WWII, and the politics of the president and military commanders, specifically MacArthur, who wanted to continue north and take North Korea decisively to keep the Soviet Union and China from controlling it before it could be reinforced by Chinese soldiers.
At the time, North Korean soldiers were outnumbered by UN forces 3:1, with far more tanks, etc than NK had.
The UN waffled, and by the time they decided Korea should be reunified, China had shipped in nearly 300,000 troops, and an unknown amount of matériel.
Fuck the UN. It’s their fault this is still going on.
Why “fuck the UN” and not “fuck China?”
Sounds like the UN could have made better choices, but the real villain (at least in the part of the history you describe) is China. No?
No
America already tried to save the North Koreans once. It was called the “Korean War”.
We bombed them back to the stone age, then permanently isolated them from most of the world. Despite having good reasons for the start of the war, America treated NK like Israel currently treats Gaza.
Even if North Koreans tried to forget that America bombed every hospital, every water purification plant, all the electricity production, etc; the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
If we actually wanted to help those people, the first step would be removal of economic sanctions. There is no clean way to remove dictatorship, but the “Arab Spring” model is much more effective and humane than the “Afghanistan War” model.
Short answer is that NK is pretty much self-contained. Occasional Kim might rattle his sabre but no one is too worried about it. Until they start making serious threats to the stability of other countries it’s just a case of leave well enough alone.
Sure it sucks what the people of NK have to endure but it’s not for other countries to tell them how they should live unless they directly ask for help or start threatening the sovereignty of other countries.
As someone else in the comments mentioned, WW2 wasn’t an intervention to protect the German citizens that were being persecuted, it was a reaction to German invasion of other nations.
Nobody wants to do that. North Korea is a shithole-class country that hates SK, is propped up by China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, who basically use them as slave labor and cannon fodder for their illegal war in Ukraine.
While NATO could easily steamroll NK, SK is right there and would get heavily damaged in a war. And then SK would probably have to take care of a ton of starving, brainwashed, uneducated people and a bombed flat country. Nobody wants to fix them, and superpowers like China are actively working against peaceful initiatives like reunification.
It’s an injustice for the world, but there’s much bigger fish to fry on the world stage right now. Existential, extinction-class threats like climate change and nuclear war. Democracies fighting tooth and nail against totalitarianism, like Ukraine. And western countries in various fights against the predictable but extremely annoying rise in fascism.
Oh absolutely the west would love to effect regime change in North Korea. Morale win, keep the military industrial complex going, grow the economy, get rid of some pesky poors in combat, maybe hoover up some natural resources.
The problem is China, NK is strategically important to them as a source of said natural resources and as a buffer zone against South Korea. Plus lots of slave labour, global economies can never have enough of that.
So yeah, messing with North Korea means messing with China. Despite some real grade A morons in power nobody has been that stupid yet.
Those pesky poors! Always getting in the way of some good imperialism 😤
Don’t worry! There’s this new little number called ‘Iran’ coming up. Plenty of opportunity to get rid of them there.
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