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What if we...do nothing at all?

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we...do nothing at all?

You mean, don't give in to NK's demands?

Look for hostilities to restart...

 whembly wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we...do nothing at all?

You mean, don't give in to NK's demands?

Look for hostilities to restart...

I mean, restate "US policy is massive retaliation for any attack launched by NK or its allies," and then ignore them unless attacked. Don't respond with restrictions, words etc, other than to calmly restate policy. If they attack, nuke them from stem to stern. If they don't attack, treat them like every other nation.

The US says "we can't back down as long as they have nuclear ICBMs that are pointed at us, nobody would do that."

And then complaints that NK won't back down, while pointing nuclear ICBMs at them, flying nuclear delivery bombers around them, parking nuclear armed submarines near them, practicing attacking them twice a year, all while parking US military forces next door.

NK has the same justification for not backing down that the US has.

It's called " FU you're not me."

 d-usa wrote:
The US says "we can't back down as long as they have nuclear ICBMs that are pointed at us, nobody would do that."

And then complaints that NK won't back down, while pointing nuclear ICBMs at them, flying nuclear delivery bombers around them, parking nuclear armed submarines near them, practicing attacking them twice a year, all while parking US military forces next door.

NK has the same justification for not backing down that the US has.

The USA has military bases in the UK, but I've never worried about US marines hitting British beaches.

The Soviet Union had nuclear warheads pointing at Britain for years, and we found out that one of the places where I used to live, was earmarked as part of the Red Army invasion plans.

And of course the WARSAW pact, and NATO had massive exercises every year. And obviously plans to attack each other, but things ran relatively smoothly.

Even if the USA withdrew all their military assets back to the Rockies, the North Koreans would still need an external enemy to rail against.

It is essential for the regime to survive that such an enemy exists.

 MarsNZ wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Well we could always agree with China that if they agree to a dismantling of North Korea and having them rejoin the South that we give them a big fat DMZ. Like say the northern half of what is now North Korea. Neither South Korea nor the US could station any troops in that area. Along with a general scaling back of US presence in Korea.

Does this fantasy solution include any consultation with the Korean people themselves? Take a look at the estimated price tag for the reintegration of the impoverished North (hint: It's in the trillions) and ask yourself who's going to foot the bill for it? You think South Korea would be amicable to a trillion dollar bill after they've just been forcefully disarmed in 25% of their own territory by their so-called ally?

Well duh, of course South Korea would be consulted in this. And you know, they would likely accept a reunification. A depression(though one likely offset by the major task of modernizing the North and international aid) is leagues better than having thousands of very big guns and nuclear missiles getting aimed at you all the time.

And given that South Korea only controls, you know, the southern half of the Korean peninsula, it's actually 50% increase in territory they can have troops in(and 100% total increase).

Yeah, they'd have major humanitarian crisis and it would cost them a lot. But ultimately in the long run it would be better for everyone involved.

So in this hypothetical scenario, what does the North Korean regime about to get stood down do? I mean, how long do they think they'd last in a reunified Korea, whether or not they get paid to go away or given cushy out-of-the-way jobs or whatever? Do we have Dennis Rodman sneak James Bond into the country to take them out, or do we just hope they don't go "well, screw you guys, then" and start hitting as many buttons as possible?

 Spinner wrote:
So in this hypothetical scenario, what does the North Korean regime about to get stood down do? I mean, how long do they think they'd last in a reunified Korea, whether or not they get paid to go away or given cushy out-of-the-way jobs or whatever? Do we have Dennis Rodman sneak James Bond into the country to take them out, or do we just hope they don't go "well, screw you guys, then" and start hitting as many buttons as possible?

Well, we could probably arrange something with the Chinese. China might be inclined to offer some asylum for the leaders of North Korea if they stood down peacefully.

If China truly put their foot down and locked down the border with North Korea, the regime would fold fairly fast due to internal problems. Most of the army would be starving at this point and would start looting their leader's storehouses where they'd be hoarding the little food that's left. Internal strife would a little hard to play off as "dem dirt capitalists ar attacking!"

Basically we'd have to wait for them to totally succumb to starvation and surrender, and if they did nuke anything(which hopefully wouldn't happen) we'd have to respond in kind. With North Korea, we can't avoid having to hope a little that they don't go nuclear on us, but this would be the best scenario for minimizing this risk and solving the whole problem instead of just dragging it out in perpetuity.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Spinner wrote:
So in this hypothetical scenario, what does the North Korean regime about to get stood down do? I mean, how long do they think they'd last in a reunified Korea, whether or not they get paid to go away or given cushy out-of-the-way jobs or whatever? Do we have Dennis Rodman sneak James Bond into the country to take them out, or do we just hope they don't go "well, screw you guys, then" and start hitting as many buttons as possible?

Well, we could probably arrange something with the Chinese. China might be inclined to offer some asylum for the leaders of North Korea if they stood down peacefully.

If China truly put their foot down and locked down the border with North Korea, the regime would fold fairly fast due to internal problems. Most of the army would be starving at this point and would start looting their leader's storehouses where they'd be hoarding the little food that's left. Internal strife would a little hard to play off as "dem dirt capitalists ar attacking!"

Basically we'd have to wait for them to totally succumb to starvation and surrender, and if they did nuke anything(which hopefully wouldn't happen) we'd have to respond in kind. With North Korea, we can't avoid having to hope a little that they don't go nuclear on us, but this would be the best scenario for minimizing this risk and solving the whole problem instead of just dragging it out in perpetuity.

The problem with this is: You're provoking them to war. The regime knows it is going to go down - why not go down swinging?

Other problem: You can point to capitalists closing the country off and say "Look! the capitalists are strangling us! Endure the hardship and we will prove we are strong!" which could just set them even more against the rest of the world, making it easier to legitimize the war that will inevitably occur when the regime realizes it is going to lose power.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Spinner wrote:
So in this hypothetical scenario, what does the North Korean regime about to get stood down do? I mean, how long do they think they'd last in a reunified Korea, whether or not they get paid to go away or given cushy out-of-the-way jobs or whatever? Do we have Dennis Rodman sneak James Bond into the country to take them out, or do we just hope they don't go "well, screw you guys, then" and start hitting as many buttons as possible?

Well, we could probably arrange something with the Chinese. China might be inclined to offer some asylum for the leaders of North Korea if they stood down peacefully.

If China truly put their foot down and locked down the border with North Korea, the regime would fold fairly fast due to internal problems. Most of the army would be starving at this point and would start looting their leader's storehouses where they'd be hoarding the little food that's left. Internal strife would a little hard to play off as "dem dirt capitalists ar attacking!"

Basically we'd have to wait for them to totally succumb to starvation and surrender, and if they did nuke anything(which hopefully wouldn't happen) we'd have to respond in kind. With North Korea, we can't avoid having to hope a little that they don't go nuclear on us, but this would be the best scenario for minimizing this risk and solving the whole problem instead of just dragging it out in perpetuity.

The problem with this is: You're provoking them to war. The regime knows it is going to go down - why not go down swinging?

Other problem: You can point to capitalists closing the country off and say "Look! the capitalists are strangling us! Endure the hardship and we will prove we are strong!" which could just set them even more against the rest of the world, making it easier to legitimize the war that will inevitably occur when the regime realizes it is going to lose power.

Sure. They'll say that is what is happening. But their people aren't going to listen to them when they're starving. And we're not talking everybody in the country isn't getting enough food. We're talking nobody in the country will have any food at all except in whatever bunker Kim hides in. Kim will effectively no longer have control over the country. The people will no longer listen to their leader, they'll start frantically looking for food. This includes most of the people in the military, and they'll start by looking in the nicer areas of the country. Kim might want to go down swinging, but he'll find he doesn't have anybody listening to him in quite short order.

Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

 feeder wrote:
Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

We're not starving anybody. It's the North Korean regime which is doing that. We are not responsible for this even if we blockade the country, that is 100% on the Kim regime. They're the ones refusing to stop the suffering for their pride and power.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

We're not starving anybody. It's the North Korean regime which is doing that. We are not responsible for this even if we blockade the country, that is 100% on the Kim regime.

Can NK support it's population 100% domestically? I do not know. I understand the North is not great agricultural land.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

What has NK actually done though?

Genocide of their own civilians. Holding another country of 51 million people hostage by, quite literally, pointing a lot of very big guns in their direction. And they're about to hold anything in range of their 3rd world ICBMs hostage too.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

We're not starving anybody. It's the North Korean regime which is doing that. We are not responsible for this even if we blockade the country, that is 100% on the Kim regime.

And this is called trying to have it both ways.

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

We're not starving anybody. It's the North Korean regime which is doing that. We are not responsible for this even if we blockade the country, that is 100% on the Kim regime.

Can NK support it's population 100% domestically? I do not know. I understand the North is not great agricultural land.

No, but that is largely due to a combination of the North destroying their land both through mismanagement and deliberately isolating themselves with their political system.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Also consider we are starving tens of millions of people to death because we are tired of hearing the same empty bluster we have been hearing for 70+ years from this government.

We're not starving anybody. It's the North Korean regime which is doing that. We are not responsible for this even if we blockade the country, that is 100% on the Kim regime.

Can NK support it's population 100% domestically? I do not know. I understand the North is not great agricultural land.

No, but that is largely due to a combination of the North destroying their land both through mismanagement and deliberately isolating themselves with their political system.

So we would be starving tens of millions of people.

They are dependent on foreign aid and black market. Foreign aid is withheld and black market is shutdown.

Foreign aid is not some sort of thing we are required to do, either morally or otherwise.

If anything, giving aid to North Korea is immoral because most of it gets siphoned off by their government to line their pockets.

If it's immoral to give to charities which skim a % off their donations then it's definitely immoral to send aid to North Korea.

North Korea created their situation, they are responsible for their citizens needing shipments of imported food to survive. Especially when North Korea could turn all their efforts to domestically make nukes into something productive that they could sell to buy food.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Foreign aid is not some sort of thing we are required to do, either morally or otherwise.

If anything, giving aid to North Korea is immoral because most of it gets siphoned off by their government to line their pockets.

If it's immoral to give to charities which skim a % off their donations then it's definitely immoral to send aid to North Korea.

North Korea created their situation, they are responsible for their citizens needing shipments of imported food to survive. Especially when North Korea could turn all their efforts to domestically make nukes into something productive that they could sell to buy food.

All of this is true.

We are still creating a massive humanitarian crisis because, after 70 years of empty threats *this* time Kim might do something.

The other issue with totally isolating them is:

From whom? For how long? Till what happens?

Because I can tell you they do a lot of business with Iran, Pakistan, and friends. Food is not a high-tech item. Food is something those countries can provide.

We're not "cutting him off till they starve and revolt" we're "driving him to want to trade functioning nuclear weapons and material for food."

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
The other issue with totally isolating them is:

From whom? For how long? Till what happens?

Because I can tell you they do a lot of business with Iran, Pakistan, and friends. Food is not a high-tech item. Food is something those countries can provide.

We're not "cutting him off till they starve and revolt" we're "driving him to want to trade functioning nuclear weapons and material for food."

Are you assuming we'd just let ships continue to go to North Korea? No, we'd be blockading them.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
The other issue with totally isolating them is:

From whom? For how long? Till what happens?

Because I can tell you they do a lot of business with Iran, Pakistan, and friends. Food is not a high-tech item. Food is something those countries can provide.

We're not "cutting him off till they starve and revolt" we're "driving him to want to trade functioning nuclear weapons and material for food."

Are you assuming we'd just let ships continue to go to North Korea? No, we'd be blockading them.

Oh yes because that's not an act of war, with either the ships going to or leaving from North Korea.

(Blockades are an act of war per international law FYI. We'd actually be the aggressor there. We'd literally come off worse than North Korea.)

Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

We were, actually, and it was a very dangerous situation that got damn close to outright WWIII. It's often considered either an excellent example of statesmanship or sheer blind miraculous luck that we didn't explode into full-scale war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I wouldn't want a repeat of the CMC. JFK was a considerably more level-headed person than Trump; imagine the reaction if one of our ships was rammed by a Chinese warship!

 Grey Templar wrote:
Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

NK has a border with both China and Russia, and neither would be willing enforcers of the embargo.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

We were, actually, and it was a very dangerous situation that got damn close to outright WWIII. It's often considered either an excellent example of statesmanship or sheer blind miraculous luck that we didn't explode into full-scale war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I wouldn't want a repeat of the CMC. JFK was a considerably more level-headed person than Trump; imagine the reaction if one of our ships was rammed by a Chinese warship!

I can't seem to find anywhere that War was actually declared during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was armed conflict during the Bay of Pigs, but it wasn't actually an official war.

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we...do nothing at all?

This is the policy we will end up with. Because any alternative to status quo is extremely risky, we will end up doing nothing. The North Korean regime has played their cards very well, you have got to hand them that.

Starving North Korea might be a lot harder than you think. North Korea has farms you know... And rivers and seas full of fish, forests full of edible berries and plants etc. etc.
Given a good harvest, they produce more than enough food to feed their population. Its only when their harvests fail that they run into food security problems and require foreign aid.

Unless we do something horrible to make North Korea's harvests continually fail, they won't starve to death (at least not enough to matter). Famines have been a standard feature of human life even in the West up until the 20th century, and in many parts of the world (including North Korea) it is still a standard part of life. It will take more than a bit of famine to take down a country.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

We were, actually, and it was a very dangerous situation that got damn close to outright WWIII. It's often considered either an excellent example of statesmanship or sheer blind miraculous luck that we didn't explode into full-scale war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I wouldn't want a repeat of the CMC. JFK was a considerably more level-headed person than Trump; imagine the reaction if one of our ships was rammed by a Chinese warship!

I can't seem to find anywhere that War was actually declared during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was armed conflict during the Bay of Pigs, but it wasn't actually an official war.

The US didn't declare war in the Vietnam War either.

I suppose it's just a Vietnam Police Action then.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Oh? Were we at war with Cuba and the Soviet Union when we blockaded Cuba?

Nope. So we can do the same thing here.

We were, actually, and it was a very dangerous situation that got damn close to outright WWIII. It's often considered either an excellent example of statesmanship or sheer blind miraculous luck that we didn't explode into full-scale war over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I wouldn't want a repeat of the CMC. JFK was a considerably more level-headed person than Trump; imagine the reaction if one of our ships was rammed by a Chinese warship!

I can't seem to find anywhere that War was actually declared during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was armed conflict during the Bay of Pigs, but it wasn't actually an official war.

The US didn't declare war in the Vietnam War either.

I suppose it's just a Vietnam Police Action then.

Never forget our POPAs/MIAs.