North Korea - Should the West/UN take action?

[Siam_Sam]

@Broomstick

China has the longest and easiest border to cross that touches NK. Most refugees that attempt to flee NK will try to go there.

And many if not most of those will then try to make it through China and Laos into Thailand to seek asylum at an embassy in Bangkok. The wife and I personally saw one group of escaped North Koreans – about five ladies, IIRC – hustled off a bus in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province, which borders Laos. Don’t know what happened to them. But the authorities up there are always watching for North Koreans.

[Tom_Tildrum]

@Green_Bean

I suspect that there is a dirty little secret out there–that a lot of people in South Korea don’t actually want reunification. They may not want their people to be suffering up there, but they also don’t want their country to suffer the economic cataclysm that reunification would entail.

I have read somewhere that that attitude is well-established and open among much of the younger generation in SoKo.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Fun with maps:

The North Korean border with China is much longer than the one with South Korea. This isn’t checkpoint Charlie. The border Russia OTOH is tiny - only 17 km wide.
Map of North Korea
North Korea–Russia border - Wikipedia

To answer the OP: the world community should stir the pot. Pressure the Chinese government not to repatriate North Koreans back: ship them to South Korea instead. No, they won’t go along with that. We should advocate that anyway.

A crazy billionaire should endow an institute in the Cayman Islands for washed out dictators. Just check your weapons at the door: coups may only be conducted on alternate Thursdays.

In other words we should move our pieces into place in preparation for the moment when opportunity/crisis arises.
Economic cataclysm: yes. North Korea has a population of 24 million compared with South Korea’s 50 million. That’s a bigger fish to swallow than experienced by Germany (16 vs 63 million). And the cultural/economic gap is bigger in Korea as well.

[Little_Nemo]

@Green_Bean

To say the only realistic options are invasion or accepting the status quo is creating a false dichotomy. There is a viable third option, which is getting China to stop supporting and protecting the Kim regime, and that includes stopping with the persecution of North Korean refugees. This won’t be easy and the positive results will likely take some time to develop, but this seems to be the best choice at the moment. Without China aiding and abetting them, the regime will topple. (Eventually.)

Okay, that is a possibility. But realistically, what do we (or anyone else) offer China that would be sufficient to cause them to drop their support of North Korea? Sure, we could do it - if we offered China a free pass on invading Taiwan, for example. But that’s the problem - the cost we’d pay to get China on board with this would be unacceptably high.