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!?
America was never about helping the people of the world. Many who believe that are mostly victims of propaganda. It’s all about American interests. If it’s in their interest they will give some reason like liberating a people as a pretence to enable military action.
Also to directly answer the question, they have nukes trained on Seoul, have the backing of China which considers it a buffer against western influenced south kr
Also there’s a city of 20 million people like 10 miles from the border that could get nuked just by conventional weapons. Adds complications
Nukes. We know they have them and missiles to deliver them. Any situation where a wildcard like North Korea uses nukes in any offensive capacity is terrifying. “Nuclear War: A Scenario” is a great modern book on how things could go to hell if one single North Korean nuclear missile is launched towards the United States.
Artillery. In any case of open war on North Korea anyone within artillery range of the NK border will be bombarded with heavy shelling. Even if it lasted for just an hour or two before the batteries were eliminated the civilian casualties and destruction would be like a large natural disaster. Now imagine if chemical shells were added to the mix, because they have those too.
China has the most leverage to help North Korea on a humanitarian and diplomatic level without risking war, so if it could be done the best chance is through them.
To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.
This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.
Despite what people keep saying, a war in NK would be short and one sided. While they could cause a lot of destruction at the start, after a few salvos their artillery would be taken out by air power. Then their entire command and control structure would be eliminated so they couldn’t communicate with their troops at all. And those troops are conditioned to not do anything without orders. So at best they’d be sitting ducks waiting to be taken out. And I’m pretty sure most of them would cost to surrender once it’s clear that the regime is gone. There’d be a share of diehards that would choose death over surrender but i don’t think that would be a large percentage.
Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.
Yes, that’s basically what we did in Iraq. It led to a 20y occupation, thousands of troops killed, hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian deaths, and several new terrorist organizations. It will cost the US alone about 8,000,000,000,000. Basically the entirety of cultural progress and then some was lost in a few months.
We saw how that failed in iran
And those troops are conditioned to not do anything without orders. So at best they’d be sitting ducks waiting to be taken out.
When you’re so racist you think Koreans are the battle droids from The Phantom Menace.
Because north korea only make empty threats and the west are hypocrites and never gave a damn,about internstional law, democracy and human rights in other countries
Or, just hear me out, because the west doesn’t want to enter into a war with China in Korea a second time.
In that case they should stop pretending to care about what i mentioned instead of acting like they care about Palestinians but still buying arms from them and keep great economical relation with the terrorist state , celebrating Israel attack on Iran under of the pretext that Iran is ruled by authoritarian regime while having great connection with Saudis, not pressuring UAE to stop support the RSF in Sudan using UAE, Israeli and USA arms
The goal poasts moved so far that I can not even see them in the field. Good talk!
😂😂😂
“Step in?” Well, because the world isn’t run by a mom and dad who step in and make governments do the right things.
Generally frowned upon to invade countries.
Ludicrously costly. Your tax payers will want to know why it’s more important than everything else you do with their money.
Immense suffering. Mostly by the people you’re trying to liberate but also your own troops and their families.
They have nukes and could probably blow up at least a few regional cities. If the regime is threatened they will most likely use them.
South Korea or China or Russia are the only countries with land borders. China and Russia find NK useful to have arround to annoy US. Seoul is within artillerty range of the border.
Building up a new state in it’s place is very difficult. Remember how the Taliban took back power about 15 minutes after the US left Afghanistan?
That’s not how it would play out or herw, but even in the best case scenario, you’d end up with a huge area with rampant poverty and discontent that would take generations to develop. We’ve had something similar in Germany. Even after thirty years and vast amounts of money spent, East Germany is still way behind and there are areas that have no perspective at all.
They have nukes
The nukes are recent, and probably not tactically functional. It’s purely a cost benefit analysis. As long as NK isn’t in serious motion to cause more damage outside their country, than it’s worth to stop them, no one will.
Yeah true. Like Turkmenistan. That country is like North Korea, but not in conflict with other countries. So no one cares.
Plus, they occasionally release pretty decent music
And don’t forget the former president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov with live performance and rap song
Certified hood classic.
Feel free to pitch the idea to congress. It will cost somewhere in the realm of trillions of dollars to invade, occupy, and rebuild North Korea. We’re talking an occupation lasting decades. A full time military presence for the foreseeable future as North Korea rebuilds something resembling a functional democratic society.
Don’t get me wrong, their military would get absolutely bodied in a full on shooting war with any sort of NATO-esque military coalition. But they have a sizable entrenched force with more than a few functional nuclear weapons. It would cost A LOT of lives.
So, that’s the bill. If you think you can convince congress to go for it, go nuts.
China would never let that happen, it would end up being a China US proxy war… Which it always was
You can’t treat governments like they’re people. The same detachment from the human spirit applies as it does to any sufficiently large corporation, multinational, politburo, royal court, whatever.
Even if your specific nation holds your specific code of ethics and standards, there can be severe consequences to holding all other nations to the same standard.
Unless you’re a superpower, in which case you’re the oppressor, simply by engaging in diplomacy.
Given all of this, what you’re asking for is for one nation to have perfect foreign policy that would compel change in North Korea. Then, all other nations would need to adopt and extend the same policy, but independently and without external pressure.
We see and hear what the US state dept wants us to hear. And nothing more.
As to the core of your question. The answer is nukes. Nukes are the only way to fend off the imperial aggression of the United States and its imperialist partners.
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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.
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If you read the previous comment more closely you’ll realize that the commentor wasn’t comparing today’s NK to Gaza, but Korea during the Korean War to Gaza. That is a reasonable comparison, as nearly every standing structure was bombed.
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Damn, maybe we should stop doing them then.
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What war? The Korean War from 70 years ago? Because they’ve been at peace since then, but some loonies in this thread want to go over and start trouble with them.
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Not peace. Peace treaty never signed just not currently engaged
North Korea was the one that started the war by invading the South
You can’t really “invade” your own country. North and South Korea were two sides in a civil war, with both sides claiming each other’s territory and aiming towards unification. It’s like saying that George Washington “invaded” Yorktown or that Lincoln “invaded” Virginia.
The South did invade the North though in the US civil war.
The Maryland campaign (or Antietam campaign) occurred September 4–20, 1862, during the American Civil War. The campaign was Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North.
And if you don’t want to use the word “invaded”, I guess you could just say that North Korea attacked the South, kicking off the war
This is like saying Ukraine started the war by invading Donbas
If Donbas was at the time part of Russia it would be like that. So it’s not really like that. Since North Korea actually went into South Korea with the intention of taking it over.
You have obviously misunderstood me.
I was comparing the United States actions in the Korean War(1950s) to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The mass civilian bombing campaigns, complete destruction of civilian infrastructure, manmade famine, widespread preventable disease, and imposed economic isolation are very similar between the two cases.
I am not comparing current-day North Korea to current-day Gaza, and I agree with you that would not be a good analogy.
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So your thesis is that the 1950s war was inconsequential, and then you lay the entire blame on the Kim regime and their policies?
My dude, how do you think the Kim regime became a dictatorship?
Before the 1950s war, Kim was a weak puppet leader propped up by the Soviet Union. By the end of the war, the Kim regime had dictatorial power, which persists to this day.
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but to blame the entire state if the country on the bombing campaign of the 1950s is to…
Nobody said that.
The issue as you see it:
clings on to a pseudo-scientific economic ideology
The prescription you suggest:
pseudo-scientific economic ideology
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the Kim regime’s propaganda will make sure they never forget.
It’s the peak of chauvinism to think people would need propaganda to remember you leveling their entire country.
Yes I agree.
If you use context instead of cherry picking a half-sentence then maybe you would understand that is part of the broader point I am trying to get across to a western, chauvinism-brained audience.
Til that I don’t know enough about the Korean War. Jfc
Ohhhhh it’s so much worse. Here’s the intro to the BlowBack podcast S3, which is all about the Korean War https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ZX1YIvtHhxuoOTaH41VNC
Very informative listen so far. Thanks for sharing
NK could not defeat the US or China militarily but it could do quite a bit of damage to SK before anyone could stop them. This is a big reason the US doesn’t intervene.
China is concerned about the population of NK suddenly becoming millions of refugees they’ll need to recuse and deal with. So they would rather the regime not collapse.
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.
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
