There’s going to have to be a long term de-programming process for John and Mary North Korean. It might take more than a generation. And I suspect they’d have more $$ if they downsized their military.
What NK has to offer now is raw materials and prison/slave labor. They need to work out something else to draw foreign trade.
Apple could assemble stuff there. 
Oh, you KNOW Foxconn would be into that shit!
I’ve just been given a harem of the most beautiful women in the country, who have all been raised to adore me like a god.
What do you think I’ll do?
Of course the next morning I’ll start market and democracy reforms, but tonight is tonight
I would worry more about internal threats than external threats. Just like Saddam. I know I’m grappling with the hypothetical: I’m just saying that the real dictator faces a far more difficult situation than the OP.
Within the context of the OP, I’d start up immediate secret negotiations with the US, then with South Korea. Then with China. Then with the US, etc. Then I’d probably surrender to China, because South Korea probably doesn’t want to deal with the fallout. Meaning I’d opt for [del]capitalism[/del] socialism with Chinese characteristics. If South Korea were willing to play the role of West Germany, that’s great. But I doubt things would work out that way. The relative populations are different (more North Koreans) as is the level of development (North Korea relatively backwards vs. old East Germany). See Tokyo Bayer’s data.
I would invade the Sudetenland.
Well looking at it mathematically there are other factors in play. North Korea currently spends 33.9 percent of their GDP on the military. If that was channeled into food production they’d have an export economy overnight.
It may be because I’m exhausted but that made my giggle for a good 2 minutes.
I like the way you think.
I’d build a giant statue of myself, probably, then provide guidance to factory workers urging them to improve productivity. Then I’d go home and get drunk.
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Congratulations, you have now created internal enemies. Or is your hypothetical that you can do anything you wish without regard to predictable internal responses?
This solution would absolutely destroy what if already an extremely sick economy. As noted by Magiver, an incredibly high percentage of GDP is devoted to military spending. Other sources show spending at about 25% of the national budget, but exact numbers don’t matter.
Suddenly throwing 500,000 men into unemployment while attempting to jump start other industries is going to lead to chaos. People are starving now. What will they do when millions more cannot buy food?
The problem with your proposed solution is that the retooling of the economy would cost trillions of dollars. Far more than any amount the US, Japan, South Korea and the EU could afford, even if they had any interest or desire to do so.
I worked with a German vendor in the late 1990s, and visited their Berlin headquarters in 1997. The differences between the two parts of the city, even seven years after reunification was stark. Former East Germans were having a terrible time adjusting to the radically different economic system. Managers in formerly state operated businesses didn’t have the skill sets to become managers in consumer driven industries, for example.
The infrastructure in the former East Germany was years behind its Western counterpart. One job category which got eliminated was bicycle messengers. The former East Germany simply didn’t have enough telephone lines so they had to rely on bikes to relay information.
And this was part of the former East Germany, the best run of the communist satellite countries. Look at the basket case of North Korea and I don’t see any real solutions.
The cost of putting in telephones, let alone internet, of educating people, retooling factories to produce modern products, and non military products.
I just did the numbers again.
South Korea has a population of about 50 million:
GDP (PPP) 2014 estimate
Total $1.755 trillion (12th)
Per capita $34,795
North Korea has a population of a little less than 25 million
GDP (PPP) 2011 estimate
Total $40 billion
Per capita $1,800
When the two Germanies reunited, the ratio between the GDPs was about 6:1. With the difference in populations of 4:1, and the relatively smaller difference in the per capita GDP, it was still an enormous burden for the combined economy.
For the Koreas, the ratios between the GDPs is about 44:1, and the difference between the populations is about 2:1. This is simply impossible.
However, the problem is how to attempt to contain starving people within your country if you start to make reforms and become friendly with South Korea. It’s a time bomb and it’s going to take far more and just redirecting soldiers to becoming farmers.
China is going to be the last of your concerns.
Those 500,000 laid off soldiers were consuming food and requiring clothing, supplies while in the military. They were consumers, not producers.
Now laid off, they’ll still need food and clothing, etc, of course, like any human being, but they could now work on farms, factories, etc. - being producers-consumers instead of just consumers.
dial it back to the end of WW-II. All of Germany was a smoking pile of rubble. Well not literally but it was a mess far greater than what you’re describing.
N Korea is a mess because it’s collectively stuck on stupid. Take away the stupid and you have an intact infrastructure capable of ramping up to to build exportable products. So they have a head start over a war-torn country. Or put another way, the world gets another source of cheap labor for the short term while they transition to South Korean standards.
I don’t understand this at all. They already have a cell phone economy and we can literally ramp that up with portable towers. Running fiber optic cable is about as difficult as driving a tractor down the side of a road. It’s a non-problem.
You’re thinking as if they would be tossed to the wolves in the dead of Winter if the current regime disintegrated. South Korea would be right there to help with the transition and the United States would provide relief.
So…what are you suggesting should be done?
Oh, it’s that simply! I wish someone would tell the Greeks that all their unemployed (around 28%, IIRC) should just start working on farms or factories.
I bet they’ll feel really embarrassed that they didn’t think of that.
I also bet there are a lot of underdeveloped countries which should have thought about that as well.
As was most of Europe and Japan. And it took decades to rebuild.
However, this situation is much more like the reunification of Germany, so I stand by what I wrote.
The reunification of Germany, also had an “intact infrastructure.” I cited a number of problems they had. Response?
Good luck with that one. I can’t see any problem with attacking foreign capital when you have your fiber links laying on the side of the road.
The problems with the East German infrastructure were enormous. The factories were out of date. Bridges needed to be rebuild. It’s taking over twenty years, and this is with one of the largest economies in the word trying to build up the most successful of the communist states.
North Korea is an economically failed state and South Korea does not have the same economic might which Germany enjoyed. And there were all those numbers which I’m not going to retype.
I’m sure the US will chip in a few bucks. That will be really nice of us.
I’ll offer a hypothetical to you.
Let’s magically make Mexico all English speaking, add another 40 million to their population, so that it would be roughly half of that of the States. Replace their economy with that of Mozambique and then open the fence.
You still would be a hell of a lot better off then Korea would, by an order of a magnitude.
If it weren’t North Korea, then it would be less of an issue. Just like the US can keep Mexico out, if North Korea weren’t related to the South, then it could be gradually built up. However, they would run into exactly the same problem as with the Germanies. Once a crack opens, how do you contain it?
Not what you are.
The problem with any dictator is that you’re only alive as long as the army wants you, and all your solutions are going to make a bunch of generals very unhappy with you. Life insurance policies don’t get paid when there are coups.
You’ve got to control the army to allow you to do what you want, which is why you don’t fire half the troops. Well, and you don’t want 500,000 guys who are trained with guns and don’t have jobs sitting around. You need jobs first. Unfortunately, you don’t have cash to build factories.
There’s absolutely zero advantage in buying the latest and greatest weapons. You’re economy is in the toilet and spending money on a few pricy toys is going to suck you dry.
If China wants you, they’ve got you, and having a few sleek fighters isn’t going to slow them down. The good news is that China doesn’t want you, either. They have enough of their own problems.
Damn. Ran out of time. More later.
This is political and economic suicide. You want to get closer to China, not further.
First, China will not be a threat. China wants to protect its territory and to project power in the China Sea. It has no vital interests in Korea, other than being its current protector. Look at Russia and the areas which it’s causing problems. These are countries which were part of the former Soviet Union AND which have large Russian minorities. While there are some ethnic Koreans in China, there isn’t a significant number of ethnic Chinese in Korea. Nor was North Korea part of modern China.
There’s no reason for China to start a war with Korea, any more than with other neighbors and there are strong reasons to not. China doesn’t want the huge price tag for cleaning up the mess any more than anyone else.
Bringing large numbers of troops to the Chinese border is simply insane. You lose all of the economic ties which are essential for propping up your regime.
If your goal is to be better than a Sudan in East Asia, and go beyond simply feeding your citizens, you need lots of money, much more than South Korea can afford. The best place to get a good share of the necessary cash is from China.
As you acknowledge in the OP, the masses aren’t ready for democracy. So, you adapt the Chinese model of migrating to a capitalistic economy under a “communist” party government. All while opening up more to South Korea, Japan and the US.
This is selling the program for far too cheap.
This is the only bargaining chip you have. Well, that and opening the borders and flooding either South Korea or China with 25 million starving people. You don’t want to sell it so cheaply.
You negotiate with the US and secretly “suspend” the program, with proper monitoring, of course, and in return, negotiate for a hell of a lot more than just an empty promise of then defending you from the non-threat of a war.
Suspending the ballistic missile part will save you a tremendous amount of money.
However, you need lots of hard cash income as well as an influx of foreign capital, experience, and training.
I think the easiest way to get immediate cash is to set up programs for migrant workers overseas. Have the US take a bunch, as well as have the US get other countries such as in the Middle East, to take a bunch more. The Philippine economy, for example, actually gets a large amount of money from workers overseas.
You restart the joint projects with South Korea and invite the Japanese and Americans to set up competing projects. Play off the various countries by promising that winning technologies and systems will be awarded increasingly larger projects as time goes on.
Secretly negotiate with South Korea to get out of the vicious cycle of now we’re friends now we hate each other. South Korea has been doing this as a way of keeping things from getting too hot or too cold for as long as I’ve been following the situation, so 25 some-odd years. They don’t want either a war or reunification with a failed state.
Japan transferred vast quantities of industrial know-how through the 1990s. (I was somewhat involved on a few projects in '92 - '93.) Much of that information was translated into Korean, and could be provided to the North now.
You want to play China against the West, specifically South Korea and America, but also Japan and Taiwan. You want to pit South Korea against Japan for competing on projects and demand transfers of technology and know-how.
Once you close the concentration camps, your days are numbered. You won’t have 25 years. Five perhaps, or 10 if you’re lucky. I donno. If you have the wisdom of Solomon, are willing to continue being ruthless and brutal to your immediate internal threats (mostly within the military) maybe you could pull it off.
I wouldn’t bet on it. I’d probably simply continue the current system of just spending an obscene amount of money on personal luxuries while the entire country dies.
But that’s why I’d make a terrible dictator. YMMV.
I would step down and let all my people be free from any and all previous dictatorship.
But you’d simply be replaced by some other dictator.
The people wouldn’t be better off. Democracy isn’t going to spring up by itself.