Aside from placing sanctions on them, if we really decided to go to war how would we do it?
The idea of just killing Kim Jong Un doesn’t sound like it’ll actually solve anything. Sure majority of their population understands and knows that their government is deceiving them and doing horrific things. But what about all the people who believe, buy into, or accept what they’re told? I think even if you kill Kim Jong Un, the regime won’t die. They’ll just take over NK with the promise of revenge for their dear leader.
So what can he possibly do? It’s like walking into a gun fight with a jihadist. You know you can kill him, but if you try he’ll just blow himself and everyone else up. What do you do?
Are you looking for a scenario that doesn’t involve starting a war with China? Because that might be hard to come by.
If you ignore that wrinkle, then “reducing large chunks of the country to ruin, causing massive death of innocents, triggering the annihilation of Seoul and possibly the nuking of Japan, eliminating all remaining shreds of global support for the US, and starting a war with China” seems like a reasonable approach. You did say it was Trump carrying this out, right?
The only real way to fix the problem is all the first would nations need to pull out of UN.
Because the UN today is joke when comes to sanctions on North Korea. The North Korea elite live very conformable life thanks to China and Russia that still trade with North Korea.
There was point in 90’s of massive famine so bad that military people where starving.
But thanks to UN North Korea no longer have famine.
Going war will destroy most of south Korea . Unless people can stomach 10 or more nukes in less than 30 minutes and hope most of all the people in North Korea are sent back to stone age.
If the question is ‘how can the U.S. deal with North Korea’ then the answer is probably ‘stay on course with a combination of sanctions, talks about what NK can do to remove the sanctions, and demonstrations of readiness to make NK aggression extremely expensive to the Kim regime.’
If the question is really ‘how can Trump, personally, deal with North Korea’ then the answer is likely to be ‘are you serious? let someone so thin-skinned and self-absorbed and ignorant try to deal with North Korea? Do you really want WW3?’
There are people who A) Believe in the Gov/Kim Jong un, B) Don’t believe in the Gov/Kim Jong un, and C) Believe either or but are afraid to do their civic duty.
Military and those who are trusted, probably are so brained washed by society that they’ll believe anything they’re told. So if Kim Jong Un falls instead of there being liberation, they may rise up in arms.
It all depends on how rational they are. Knowing what I know about people, I wouldn’t say it’s safe to trust large groups of people to act rational.
May I suggest an idea which I haven’t seen anywhere yet:
Instead of talking about carpet bombing N.Korea,would it be possible to “carpet bomb” them with information?
During the cold war, the US proudly set up Radio Free Europe to broadcast true news to communist countries, and I was surprised to learn that it still exists today. Could we do the same in Korea?
There is one and only one thing that Kim Jong Un fears: losing control of his supreme status.
So if the west wants to threaten him, we have to do it on the only issue that he cares about.
He doesn’t care about economic sanctions or any other political threats from the western world.
He doesn’t care about losing trade with China, as long as his personal palace still gets supplied with booze and porn.
He doesn’t care about the “fire and fury” of enemy armies, because he knows with 100% certainty that nobody will initiate an attack on N.Korea
But he does care deeply about keeping his people brainwashed and cut off from any possible information that might make them think.
I understand that every house in N.Korea has a radio and/or TV which is hardwired to receive only one frequency.
Could we hijack that frequency with a high-powered transmitter?
If we could override the local propaganda and show the average citizen in Pyongyang the truth about the world, Kim Jong just might understand that the west has a weapon which is a genuine threat he needs to fear.
Is this idea silly/dangerous/impossible for technical reasons?
(since this idea doesn’t seem to be under consideration anywhere, I assume that there must be something that I am not understanding. What is it?)
The North Korean government has no doubt warned its populace of this sort of thing. “Beware of the outside world. They’ll tell you all kinds of lies - lies like, life in capitalism is much better than life in socialism. Lies like - North Korea is a hellhole, that America is a peace-loving country, that we’ll all have good food to eat if we flee this country.”
And by warning as such, Pyongyang gets to poison the well for any such future propaganda attempts that follow.
Now, when or if the West does hijack the radio, or drop leaflets, or whatnot, the North Koreans will roll eyes, “Aha, the West is doing exactly what our Dear Leader said they would - they are trying to sell us their lie, that life in the outside world is better.”
There are private activists who float balloons with DVDs and leaflets in them over the Korean border. Occasionally during politically sensitive moments the South Korean government will nicely ask them to stop, but there’s no law against it. I wonder if South Korea might prefer it this way so they can tell North Korea “hey, our government is not responsible for the contents of those balloons.”
During the cold war, people in Iron Curtain counties would, in the quiet privacy of their own homes tune in to Voice of America on their AM/FM/MW radios. News from the west, especially news related to Soviet activities, was broadcast regularly. Families would gather around kitchen tables late in the evening and listen with the sound turned down to a whisper. Now, it wasn’t legal and if you heard so much as a shuffle outside the front door, people would immediately change the channel to something that would not get you hauled in front of the local KGB office for some very unpleasant consequences.
I doubt very much something similar isn’t going on in NK.
Those people may be cowed into towing the party line when asked by reporters. Would not surprise me if crowds are seeded with DPRK secret service agents when they know western media is going to be conducting news programs. But I feel certain that there is no small number of people who are much more aware of what’s going on outside their borders or what the DPRK propaganda machine wants them to know.
A lot of Americans believe Donald Trump. And they have a free press to listen to as an alternative.
Kim Jong-un and his regime have a much tighter control over what North Koreans hear and see. My guess is that even if they suspect their government is telling some lies, average North Koreans are going to substantially believe what their government is telling them.
I think we should do what we did with the old USSR and work to undermine the regime slowly by showing the lies of the Kim’s and slowly getting them to open up to the outside world. Remember when Moscow opened its first McDonalds? That was basically the end for the old line communist party.
The only way NK falls, IMO, is if China decides they want NK to fall. If China starts actively working to undermine the NK regime then it may become unstable. Unless that happens, the regime will survive.
Having said that, I do worry about the future. What is the long term goal of North Korea? I think it is to become a major proliferator of missile technology and WMD.
Imagine a world in 10-20 years where North Korea creates enough uranium and plutonium to create a dozen nuclear weapons a year. They will not only sell that fissile material to anyone with money, they will sell pre-made bombs, nuclear tech to help other countries set up their own nuclear programs, and sell missiles to nations with money.
It will cause a lot of global instability. And the world won’t be able to do anything because NK just has to threaten to nuke Seoul, Tokyo and whatever cities in the US that their bombs can reach. Its a world where any country or organization that can come up with a billion dollars can get a nuke.
Also this is not baseless speculation. North Korea has sold nuclear technology to Syria, Myanmar, Libya, Iran. They’ve sold chemical weapons to Syria, and the chemical weapons that Syria has used in their civil war likely came from Syria. The nuclear plant that Israel bombs in Operation Orchardwas designed with help from north korea.
He could appoint Dennis Rodman as a special envoy, and authorize him to offer Kim a program, with American assistance and training, whereby North Korea could train up a basketball team which could compete internationally.
[QUOTE=General Mattis]
“Any threat to the United States or its territories including Guam or our allies will be met with a massive military response,” Mattis said in a statement outside of the White House.
[/QUOTE]
East Germans had a particularly good window into the West due to be right next door to a larger, capitalist country with the exact same language. Except for Dresden (aka the Valley of the Clueless) almost everyone in East Germany had access to regular West German radio & TV.
I do worry that this will end in blood whether we act preemtively or whether we wait. I fear the Kim Regime because Kim himself seems unstable. I can see him waving the threat of nuclear war in our face for a lessening of sanctions, or for more money, more aid, etc. The little boy throwing a tantrum now has very powerful tools to make his parents obey and capitulate.
I worry that no matter what Trump does, this will only end in a lot of death.
You assume that -un is actually in charge. More likely he is pirouetting around a very narrow line in order to stay where he is. He may be little more than a figurehead for the true PTB in the government, acting crazy because that is what they want from him.
Nicolo Machiavelli, mostly. A leader is only as strong as his supporters and relies on them to keep him in power. The government is a symbiotic entity, and the leader may actually be pulling the levers or he may have strings on his mouth and limbs – I tend to suspect the latter more than the latter.