In my mind, the “right” answer is to help innocent people when possible but not reward a brutal dictatorship. If you can come up with a better way to do that, let me know. At least my way isn’t hypocritical by rewarding the regime (giving them what they want) and turning a blind eye to what goes on there.
If North Korea wants the world to provide food for its people, they have to be willing to pay a price. In this case, that price is not brutalizing their people during the process of feeding the starving. Even if they stop brutalizing their own people for the weeks/months that food is being handed out, that’s better than nothing. Don’t you agree that’s better than just dumping food there and walking away? If they can’t at least do that, then we shouldn’t be giving them anything. It’s not the world’s fault that North Korea can’t feed itself and spends all its money on military weapons. Why should the West have to pay for their reckless decisions, even if that means innocent people suffer?
The idea is to keep people from starving to death. If we want to punish the people for the actions of the dictatorship, then at least we should admit that that is what we are doing.
As I said, international diplomacy is hard, and there are not right or often good answers. Your preferred course of action results in the starvation deaths of millions of people, mine allows some people to claim that we are “rewarding” the regime. Is yours really “better”?
No one said anything about turning a blind eye to what goes on there. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t starve innocent people as a way to punish a dictator who will not miss a single meal themself.
More the question is, do we want to provide humanitarian aid to avoid having millions of people starve to death. If so, then we have to be willing to compromise a bit.
I never said that’s what we should do, so the dichotomy created here is false.
And it’s not the world’s fault when any particular country has a famine, but it’s not about who is at fault, it’s whether we want to have millions of people die of starvation.
When it is preventing the suffering of innocent people you are trying to prevent, allowing the suffering of innocent people in furtherance of that goal seems counterproductive.
Let’s agree to disagree. I don’t see a middle ground that would make both of us happy. Regime change, whether internal or external, should have happened long ago. It didn’t, and there’s no way to change that now.
I posed the question to see if there was an appetite for removing North Korea from the UN for repeatedly violating the UN Charter, assuming the General Assembly alone had the ability to do it. It turns out my assumption was wrong, so the question is meaningless. China and Russia will always protect their friends, just as the US will.
Just to be clear, I don’t condone letting millions of innocent people starve, however, I don’t think the strategy of feeding North Korea during a famine and thus allowing the regime to divert even more resources toward building weapons, while at the same time helping them feed their army with no consequences was the best possible decision. Nevertheless, it was done, so it doesn’t matter what I think.
I realize the US has subs with nukes close enough to North Korea to retaliate if one of our allies is attacked, and if North Korea was somehow able to launch a strike against the US, I assume it would be wiped off the map. I know that sounds harsh, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
Since it’s not feasible to disarm North Korea, and since the UN is unable to stop them or even slow them down with sanctions, what’s left? The only thing we can do is give our allies the ability to respond decisively and have assets poised to aid them should North Korea launch a strike. I don’t think there’s much more we can do than that.
Let me know if you think there is something else we should be doing. Meanwhile, North Korea, and perhaps someday Iran or some other rogue nation, can build up nuclear arsenals with relative impunity. UN sanctions are clearly not the answer.
Slowed? Almost certainly. There’s a massive amount of material necessary for building a nuclear arsenal that North Korea has a lot of trouble accessing. It obviously hasn’t stopped it, but a North Korea that can only produce 6-7 nukes a year is still preferable to a North Korea that can produce 20 nukes a year.
Then why are you so keen on applying yet another sanction? That’s all kicking them out of the UN is - another sanction. And one that’s got a lot less teeth than the sanctions they’re already under.
Removing a country isn’t the same as a sanction. A sanctioned country can still vote in the UN, for whatever that’s worth, an expelled government can’t.
So instead of NK being able to make ten nukes a year, they can only make seven, and that shows UN sanctions are working? It only takes a handful of nukes to level Seoul, and they already have 30-40 ready to go. Sanctions aren’t working.
You’re nitpicking. Sanctions are punishments, but not every possible punishment is a sanction. If you want to call expulsion just another sanction, go ahead. I think expulsion is much worse than any “normal” UN sanction, it’s dismembership.
You said, “There’s a massive amount of material necessary for building a nuclear arsenal that North Korea has a lot of trouble accessing.” which sounds like the trouble they are having has something to do with sanctions, and therefore sanctions are working. Did I misunderstand you?
Are you talking about the UN or the entire World? For the UN the only option other than sanctions is to do nothing since the UN doesn’t have the ability to make war. It doesn’t matter which one they choose since they both ultimately have the same effect. If you’re asking what the World should do, that’s a different thread.
I mean, the CIA is probably not in the business of coddling Kim.
After you’ve read that, and in light of what has happened in Europe this year, are you really saying that N. Korea is such a dire threat?
The way I read it, they’d be lucky if the missiles they have don’t detonate on take off.
Has NK created underground nuclear explosions? Does NK have missiles that can reliably reach South Korea and Japan? Tell the South Koreans and Japanese NK isn’t a real threat, don’t tell me. I’ve been to Seoul and Tokyo, have you?
I’m not convinced that harsh sanctions against nuclear weapons programs even provide an incentive in the correct direction. You know who doesn’t get pushed around by the UN: countries with nuclear weapons.
Well, now I’m curious what distinction you see between “punishment that is not a sanction” and “punishment that is a sanction.” I also wonder what you think a “normal” UN sanction is.
FWIW, here’s a list of the sanctions imposed on North Korea by the UN Security Council, from Wikipedia:
Resolution 1874, passed after the second nuclear test in 2009, broadened the arms embargo. Member states were encouraged to inspect ships and destroy any cargo suspected of being related to the nuclear weapons program.[2][5]
Resolution 2087, passed in January 2013 after a satellite launch, strengthened previous sanctions by clarifying a state’s right to seize and destroy cargo suspected of heading to or from North Korea for purposes of military research and development.[2][5]
Resolution 2094, passed in March 2013 after the third nuclear test, imposed sanctions on money transfers and aimed to shut North Korea out of the international financial system.[2][5]
Resolution 2270, passed in March 2016 after the fourth nuclear test, further strengthened existing sanctions.[10] It banned the export of gold, vanadium, titanium, and rare earth metals. The export of coal and iron were also banned, with an exemption for transactions that were purely for “livelihood purposes.”[11][5]
Resolution 2321, passed in November 2016, capped North Korea’s coal exports and banned exports of copper, nickel, zinc, and silver.[12][13] In February 2017, a UN panel said that 116 of 193 member states had not yet submitted a report on their implementation of these sanctions, though China had.[14]
Resolution 2371, passed in August 2017, banned all exports of coal, iron, lead, and seafood. The resolution also imposed new restrictions on North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank and prohibited any increase in the number of North Koreans working in foreign countries.[15]
Resolution 2375, passed on 11 September 2017, limited North Korean crude oil and refined petroleum product imports; banned joint ventures, textile exports, natural gas condensate and liquid imports; and banned North Korean nationals from working abroad in other countries.[16]
Resolution 2397, passed on 22 December 2017 after the launch of a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, limited North Korean crude oil and refined petroleum product imports to 500,000 barrels per year, banned the export of food, machinery and electrical equipment, called for the repatriation of all North Korean nationals earning income abroad within 24 months. The resolution also authorized member states to seize and inspect any vessel in their territorial waters found to be illicitly providing oil or other prohibited products to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.[17]
Your mileage may vary, but limiting oil imports to 500,000 a year (South Korea, by contrast, imports six times that much a day) sounds like a much stronger punishment than not being allowed their usual protest vote in the general assembly.
You asked if sanctions had slowed their nuclear program. I answered that question. If you think that counts as working, great. If you don’t, also great. If you don’t think it was slowed, we can discuss that, but I’m not really interested in a semantic debate over what counts as a sanction “working” or not.
Which brings us back around to, “If the UN is so completely impotent, why do you think being kicked out of it would matter to North Korea?”
Mods: I started this thread by asking a question I thought would start an actual debate. It turns out my assumption that NK could be expelled from the UN was invalid. The thread soon devolved into a lot of different side issues and resulted in a pointless pissing contest. Feel free to lock this thread. It was a misfire from the beginning.
I don’t think you’ve thought through just how fucked Ukraine would be right now if the UN acted the way you want it to. The only reason the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics aren’t sharing the spot of ‘nations’ only recognized by the same 5 nations that recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia is because Russia ran sham referendums, so they now consider themselves to no longer exist as ‘nations’ but as oblasts of the Russian Federation as of this September. Nobody did - and for practical purposes nobody could do anything in 2014 since Ukraine was in no position to fight then the way they are now, so by your rules and your words, just substitute the DPR and LPR for South Ossetia and Ukraine for Georgia:
Meaning the LDR and DPR would have to have been seated in the UN in 2014 and recognized as independent countries, international law be damned, or ‘perhaps treated as a province of Russia’ without Russia having to even go through the bother of a sham referendum. On the same basis Crimea would be considered a legitimate part of Russia since nobody stopped them from taking it in 2014; and again, nobody was in the position to back then.
Ukraine would be fucked the exact same amount it is fucked right now. Pretending Russia didn’t occupy and set up puppet regimes in Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk has not freed Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk .
Ukraine wasn’t fucked by anything the UN did or didn’t do. Ukraine was fucked because Russia invaded their country.
That’s a thing that happened. Acknowledging it happened is simply an acknowledgement of reality. It’s not saying the world approves of what happened.
…the United States of America incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere else in the world.
I’ve used this example before: but if you were to release just half of the people detained currently in America, they would still have twice as many people locked up (per capita) than Australia does.
Do you want a list of everything evil the American regime are responsible for? You don’t deserve a pass. But you get one. I’m infinitely more worried about American imperialism than I am about North Korea. North Korea aren’t the ones that proposed the deployment of a rapid action force to Haiti today.
If anything, shouldn’t this be “Should Russia be kicked out of the United Nations?” If any country should get the boot based on current behaviour, shouldn’t it be Russia?
And this, IMHO, is part of the crux of the matter. Assuming that this ends with the vanquishing of Russia, then what? A present day Marshal plan? Or what?
No, the situation in 1971 was very different. Nixon was not trying to avoid “pissing off China,” he was making overtures. Nixon made the opening of Red China to the world the very cornerstone of his entire foreign policy. I was around at the time, I remember it while it was developing. Kissinger had made a secret visit to Beijing (we were still calling it “Peking” back then) and arranged for the famous ping-pong diplomacy as a means to ease Red China open gently, and laid the groundwork for Nixon’s epic visit in 1972.
You have to understand at the time Red China had been not officially recognized as existing at all by the US ever since 1949. After the Chinese Communist break with the Soviet Union in 1959, China had been a near-pariah with Albania as its only ally. For Nixon to open Red China to America under these conditions was a foreign policy coup of epic proportions. It set in motion a realignment of global power and diplomacy structures, disadvantageously for the USSR.
In that context, the October 1971 expulsion of Taiwan from the UN, and the recognition of Red China as the legitimate occupant of the Security Council’s permanent China seat, was part of the deal Kissinger worked out with Beijing. In order to open up full diplomatic relations with Red China, we had to screw Taiwan.
Or on the same topic, I’m not sure that the country with the 2nd most nuclear weapons (probably the most that actually work) and the only country that’s used them against the citizens of another country in war has a ton of moral high ground to demand that other countries don’t get to have them.