North Korea already is a pool of cheap labor for South Korea. That is, it is such a pool when North Korea’s government isn’t pissing off South Korea’s government or pissed off at South Korea.
Yeah, I know about Kaesong. It’s more of a handout, even if it is profitable for everybody involved.
I can’t imagine the actual economic impact of a suddenly unified Korea. The East Germany experience really is apt. That transition didn’t go that smoothly and the effects are still being felt (Angela Merkel’s ascension being a prime example) with the East still economically lagging the West.
And that was an “easy” transition compared to the one being proposed.
Man, I don’t know the specifics of what to do about Somalia. Another crazy situation. I support putting together a think tank that makes cost-benefit analyses of helping different countries, and then I support investing in doing whatever they recommend.
Even when their suggested course of action is “Leave them the fuck alone?”
Yes.
For Might makes Right!
Until they’re seen the light
They’ve got to be protected
All their rights respected
Until someone we like can be elected!
Man, for a guy writing before Vietnam, Lehrer was a freaking prophet.
Or perhaps “if a lot of countries make an expensive and sustained commitment they can maybe slowly help these people a bit.”
mr. jp - I think it’s great that you’re interested in helping the people of North Korea, and I too look forward to the day when the current regime is no longer in power. However, the simple fact is that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot we can do to improve the situation at the moment.
Regarding the suggestion that we entice China to invade, there does not exist enough money in the world to interest China in a preemptive invasion of North Korea. It is completely against their interests for the following reasons:
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The core of China’s foreign policy doctrine is basically “What happens inside a country is the business of that country and no one else”. Furthermore, for rather obvious reasons, China is not exactly interested in setting a precedent that nations should invade other nations to prevent human rights abuses.
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The principle concern of the Chinese Communist Party, above all else, is stability. Invading North Korea would cause extreme controversy both within the Party and in the country at large, would lead to the chaos caused by millions of impoverished refugees streaming over their border, and would generally be a very unstable situation.
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While the Chinese government is not exactly thrilled with some of the actions the North Koreans have taken over the last few years, the fact remains that North Korea is one of its oldest and closest allies.
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China has enough problems lifting its own population out of poverty and isn’t interested in adding 20 million impoverished, uneducated people who don’t speak Chinese to the list of things they need to deal with.
As others have pointed out, a preemptive American invasion of North Korea would result in a war on a scale that hasn’t been seen since WWII, likely killing millions of people including a large chunk of the people you are trying to help.
As to the suggestion of an American sponsored coup, well, it’s just not that easy to pull that kind of scheme off successfully. Look at our history of assassination and coup attempts in Cuba-- how well did they work out? We knew a lot more and had a lot more access to the internal operations of the Cuban government than we do with North Korea and they still failed. The risk could be taken with Cuba because they lacked the military ability to project power beyond their shores, so there was no risk of retaliation. With North Korea this would not be true.
While the Kim regime has proven incompetent in some areas, such as feeding their people and developing their economy, they have proven to be very skilled in other areas, including maintaining the security of their leadership and suppressing internal dissent. Trying to instigate a coup in North Korea would have a very low probability of success and a very high probability of starting a horrific war.
It would be awesome if there was some grand action we could take that would immediately result in a free and happy North Korea, but there just isn’t. The best we can do is try to influence the regime to take steps toward more acceptable policies. We have tried to do this through economic sanctions, through convincing China to put pressure on the North Koreans from their end, through providing food aid in exchange for doing things we want them to, through encouraging gradual economic liberalization via free trade zones with South Korea, and other similar methods. You can argue about the efficacy of the exact steps we have taken, but these are the general kinds of tools we have available that provide the likeliest means for ultimately improving the lives of the North Korean people.
If you’ve got any other suggestions for what outsiders could do to help the North Korean people, feel free to toss them out there and let us know why you think it would work. I can’t think of any myself. It’s very noble to want to ride in a white horse and save people from oppression, but the complex reality of the situation is that any attempt to do so would likely result in more suffering than it would prevent.
The historical mistakes here have been pointed out. I would add that sustained US effort is unlikely to occur for purely humanitarian reasons. Northerners who thought that the Civil War was above all to help the slaves tended to be copperheads, and Americans who thought our involvement would greatly help Jews tended to be isolationists.
What would have happened if Hitler had broken the pack with Japan requiring him to declare war on the US? It’s a great unknown of history.
Ten think tanks might give twelve different answers. That’s because no one knows what to do.
I’m for foreign aid to a point, but the idea is to find ways that will help a little, rather to expect outsiders can turn a country around. When North Korea collapses, transparency there will increase, and there will be reasonable ways to help the transition. The same aid now would be monopolized by their military. Of course, when mass starvation is at its worst, I would give food anyway.
Helping the absolute worst off the most will not work well, because the worse off the country is, the poorer our understanding of how to make it better.
Exactly right. China is more concerned with not having to basically fight a two-front battle. There are at least two independence movements going on in China right now and the national government isn’t pleased with their existance in the first place and certainly not with the tactics used (self-immolation in one, destruction of a police station and killing of the police staffing the place in another) by them. Essentially, the PRC/CCP has its plate full at the moment.
See just above. Stability is the be all and end all of PRC foreign policy in Asia. There’s also the whole hornet’s nest that would be opened if the PRC were to liberate another country’s populace from its communist rulers. Folks back in China might get ideas, you know.
Exactly right. And China’s government still has the idea that not abandoning Pyeongyang, not pulling the rug out from under Kim Jeongun, is the best course of action at the moment. Basically, it’s the least bad choice out of a slate of nothing but bad choices.
Again, correct. As of 2009, there were about 230 million migrant workers in China. Those migrant workers, while contributing to the building of the cities where they’re working, also tax the existing infrastructure especially if they bring their families along with them.
Also, China has problems with people in China who don’t speak Putonghua! A number of the very old people did not receive the kind of education available to many today. Those elderly did not learn Putonghua.
Speaking of education, the government run schools require the students to have the correct residence certificate, sometimes referred to in English as family register. That register is tied to the hukou. Since I’ve been in China, there have been panel discussions near daily on the news about reforming the system. I seriously doubt there will be any reforms so long as the system as currently enforced keeps the labor costs down and the drain on the big city’s tax coffers down.
The default response for te PTB in NK is to obliterate as much of the Seoul Capital Area (almost 26 million people). But say they fail to do that and the invasion actualy works. What’s going to happen to the people currently in NK’s concentration camps, those camps NK emphatically states simply do not exist? The first step the government will take is to kill every single one of the prisoners. The second sep is to destroy the camp. The latest guestimate of the total concentration camp population is approximately 200,000 people. They will all be dead the moment the current regime realizes that they will be out of power.
For North Korea, it’s simply impossible to launch such a coup or coup attempt. Look at the divided Germany. During the division, there were actually people living on one side and commuting to the other on a daily basis. Yes, it was a hassle. Yes, they were watched, but not as closely as North Korea watches everyone. The East German military wasn’t indoctrinated to the extent that everyone in North Korea is. East German society still had access to information from outside thec ountry.
North Korea isn’t just different, it’s Different with a capital D. East Germans didn’t have songbun. Soviets didn’t have songbun. Songbun is everything in North Korea. You don’t have songbun, you have nothing. Songbun is assigned to you at birth and dictates your life forever. There is only one way to change your songbun and it’s not to improve it.
So, you want to insert someone into North Korean society. Fine. Dandy. How? How are you going to create songbun for that person or those people? Where are you going to put them where they won’t be noticed as “not North Korean”? Where are you going to get the materials (weaponry) to carry out your coup? How are you going to fight 100% indoctrination of the entire population of the country for over 60 years?
Most importantly: How are you going to keep the society itself from completely disintegrating violently when you take out the ruling elite? Please, remember also that the ruling elite is not just one person.
Again, right. Heck, South Korea even tried treating North Korea like North Korea isn’t a pariah state. It didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. If anything, it gave the NK regime ideas, bad ideas.
You see, this is what I was talking about when I said jp’s suggestions sounded like suggestions for taking over a country like South Korea, not taking over South Korea. Everyone else in the thread seems to have grasped that. jp, on the other hand, seems to me to not realize how different North Korea is from, well, from everywhere else on the planet.
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Bribe someone. Yeah, right. Bribe whom? How? You don’t sashay into North Korea. And the people in power generally already have what they need: power. You can’t give them more than that.
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Hire someone to assassinate the leader. Yeah, right. Hire whom? Those who aren’t abjectly worshiping the leader are in those supposedly-non-existant concentration camps.
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Persuade the locals to change society. Yeah, right. Persuade whom? You’re not going to meet anyone. Everyone entering the country is shadowed and monitored. You will not meet anyone other than those who enjoy certain benefits under the current regime and do not want that to change. On top of that, say you do manage to escaped your handlers and talk to someone you somehow met. They decide they, against their own immediate self-interest, suggest to someone else that the current leadership just might not be all that. POW! Three generations of that person’s family are off to the prison camps.
Somalia is a failed state. But it’s not completely government-less. There are a couple of governments there. That’s part of the problem in Somalia. Worshiping the leader, not having information about the outside world, being assigned songbun at birth, all of those aren’t problems in Somalia. They are in North Korea.
North Korea’s ruling elite aren’t giving up power voluntarily. And short of a full-on invasion, which will cost the lives of millions, including the lives of people in Japan who aren’t even party to the invasion, they’re not going to lose power.
I, for one, am not interested in a punk like KJE (or his controllers (ahem, “uncle-in-law”)) deciding that a nifty way to go out would be with a bang like launching one of his precious few nukes at Americans. And, yes, there are Americans living kind of close to Asia, even closer than Hawaii is. Let’s let the diplomats from the US, the PRC, Japan, South Korea, and Russia keep trying what they’re trying. So far, it seems to be working as best as it can: no second invasion of South Korea, no nuclear attack launched.
This is actually pretty close to actual advice. Except that the aid advocated is almost wholly non-military.
The OP might be interested in reading the reviews for this book: Amazon.com
By the way, the assertion that China wants to keep North Korea as it is now is to have a buffer state between China and a democratic state is pure bunk. China has more than a couple of democracies on its borders and isn’t at all concerned about that. What it is concerned about, as has been mentioned umpteen times by umpteen people, is stability. China needs the region to be stable so that it can continue to control its own people the way it’s controlling them now.
So, for a factual look at the states bordering China, check out this bodacious list:
[ol][li]North Korea. Juche single-party state*.[/li][li]Russia[/li][li]Mongolia[/li][li]Kazakhstan[/li][li]Kyrgyzstan [/li][li]Tajikstan[/li][li]Afghanistan[/li][li]Pakistan[/li][li]Nepal[/li][li]Bhutan[/li][li]Burma[/li][li]Laos[/li][li]Vietnam[/li][li]India. The largest democracy on the planet and it’s on China’s border! Do you really think that the PRC needs a tiny little country of 28 million people as a buffer against another tiny little country of 50 million people when they already have more than a billion people in a democracy on China’s border? Get real.[/ol][/li]
*Wait! What? It’s not a communist state? Nope. Doesn’t even pretend to be. It purports to be its own special brand of socialism, Juche. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine how many of the other countries on China’s borders are also democracies.
Germany was under no obligation to declare war upon the US just because Japan did. The Tripartite Pact only required military assistance when one of the powers was attacked (see Article 3). This is why Japan didn’t declare war on the Soviet Union when Germany attacked it on June 22, 1941, and why upon signing the pact Japan didn’t go to war with the British and the Dutch with whom Germany was at war with and Germany didn’t go to war with China which Japan was already at war with.
As to what would have happened had Hitler not declared war upon the US, he really had no reason not to. The US and Germany were already in an undeclared shooting war in the Atlantic and had been since spring. The US Navy was escorting British convoys with orders to shoot on sight any German U-boats, surface vessels, or aircraft encountered. The USS Niblack rolled the first US depth charges at a U-boat on April 10th, 1941. Declaring war upon the US allowed long range U-boats to operate at will against shipping along the US coast, where convoys were not organized and the delay in taking blackout precautions seriously meant US coastal cities were brightly lit, allowing merchant ships to be silhouetted and easily spotted. During Operation Drumbeat, bolding mine:
To be fair, China has a buffer between it and India. It’s called Tibet.
Funny! I guess it’s not doing such a hot job, though, as a buffer since there have recently been clashes between China’s border cops and India’s.
Also, Tibet has one of the independence movements I mentioned upthread.
I was curious how you’d answer Czarcasm’s question, but your explanation leaves me as mystified as before.
Pronouns need antecedents. Who’s “we”? Who would be “making a profit”?
Let me play Devil’s Advocate for just a bit here, what will happen to those folks if there is no invasion?
In other news, this isn’t going to help things.
I think we have other (closer) dystopian nations we need to worry about, like police state America.
This is getting rather tedious. I’m not sure why you feel compelled to point me about by name in your reply to another poster. I’m also not sure why you are so set on focusing on my supposed lack of knowledge, reading and inability to discern North Korea from other countries. What is my capital offense really. Thinking that it might be possible to do something? I know that a war would be very costly, and that a succesful coup might not be realistic. If those options are fully impossible, then I still think we could do smaller things, like doing more to help the people who escape the country, or trying to get more information to the citizens somehow, or something else. I’m sure experts in the field can come up with better ideas than I can think of off the bat. My (initial) question is more about why people aren’t more focused about rescuing these people, than they are about the threat North Korea might pose to Americans.
Good post. This is the kind of debate I (naively) hoped for when I started this thread.
Lately, it appears the actual police here are less dangerous than the Neighborhood Watch.