My conviction is that, in about 20-40 years, the rest of the world is going to find a mass grave of what used to be a nation in the Korean Peninsula. When asked about this, world leaders will scratch the backs of their heads and stare at their shoes.
That's unfair. As the other comments have noted, this is a difficult situation with few options, all of them bad. It's easy to say we should do something about the people suffering there, but what can be done without either war or the regime's cooperation?
I would probably start by giving non-negligible weight to the 25M people who are currently suffering. Essentially every analysis I hear is about preventing hypothetical attacks in the future on the wealthy countries making the decisions.
You're dodging the point. What, exactly, would you have done for these people? Invade to free them? Sparks a war of mass death across the peninsula. Try to convince the Kim regime to close the prison camps and end the totalitarian brutality? They don't seem very keen on doing that anytime soon.
Im dodging nothing. I have no expertise on any of this, so I can't possibly have an informed opinion. But if I'm listening to people who claim to have such opinions weigh various plans and they never once mention the North Korean people, I can reasonably infer they don't much care about them. Given that the North Korean probably fare better under military intervention, I suspect that military intervention is a better option than most people think.
You've summed it up nicely--it is basically a nation-size concentration camp.
There are all kinds of wonderful realpolitick reasons for not invading or assassinating or taking direct action. It suits China, it suits the US, it suits the UN, it probably even suits South Korea. And the maintenance cost is just a bunch of dead nork civilians.
Those reasons will make a fine plaque at the memorial for the dead. Our children will wonder how we could let such a thing happen.
EDIT: If somebody would like to explain how the combined armed forces of China and the US couldn't forcibly remove the malnourished and undertrained folks cannibalizing their own country, I'd love to hear the theory.
Least of all since any proper insurgency requires food and support of the locals, which it sounds like may not exist.
I can't tell if you're just pretending to be this stupid.
The ability to defeat North Korea isn't the question, the question is what the cost would be. North Korea, before being inevitably defeated, could do enormous damage to South Korea and Japan.
You make smug comments about "plaques at the memorial for the dead"; what will you put on the memorials for the people of Seoul or Tokyo if they're destroyed in the war? "Sorry you had to die in a conventional/nuclear attack, but I'm sure you'll agree your deaths were worth it! Thanks for your sacrifice!"
With a navy group next door and the massive amount of anti-missle and anti-artillery stuff that's doubtless setup on the peninsula, I don't think the risk of a strike on Japan or S. Korea doing any significant damage is that high.
>I can reasonably infer they don't much care about them.
No, you can't. You can infer that there are other factors that you are, bizarrely, ignoring.
>Given that the North Korean probably fare better under military intervention, I suspect that military intervention is a better option than most people think.
It's possible that military intervention may be better for the people of North Korea. But you're not thinking of the total costs of such intervention: the devastation of South Korea, possibly even nuclear attacks on major Japanese cities.
This is why the situation is so difficult: all of the options have titanic costs.
