A UN investigation has revealed/confirmed (unsurprisingly) that North Korea is guilty of some pretty horrendous human rights violations.
Is it incumbent upon the world community to tap NK on the shoulder, and say ‘cut it out’? If they don’t, how far should the world community be prepared to go ‘To do something about it’? North Korea is already under a wide range of economic sanctions, how much farther can that be pushed to achieve anything. Presumably you’d just be inflicting more pain on those already suffering in any case. I’m sure the ruling elite would be the last to feel the pinch.
An article I read this morning likened it to the Holocaust, in the sense that the catch cry after WWII was “If only we’d known”. Will we wind up saying the same thing here? Is it even fair to draw that parallel? Don’t get me wrong by all accounts what’s going on in NK right now is terrible and abhorrent, but doesn’t appear to be industrialised genocide. At what point do you make the call that stopping this is worth the lives of some our citizens?
The essential question/debate is should ‘We’ get directly involved, and should that involvement mean military action?
For me, thinking idealistically, damn straight we should do something. But in the real world there are a lot of considerations. Not least of which is China seems content to support NK. I don’t know why, maybe they like having a ‘bad guy’ in the region. But I would be very concerned about something escalating with China if military action was taken.
Is there a middle ground between more (useless) sanctions and boots on the ground?