Right. The resources to take out NK so badly in a conventional preemptive strike so as to prevent a disastrous first counterstrike(*) are not there, mobilizing the kind of force it would take would get noticed well before they got to that level.
(*Which would largely require also the NK army’s survivors of the first strike turning around and murdering their commanders and political officers rather than carry out their orders)
So your argument is that powerful nations like the US, Russa, and China respect NK’s autonomy because of international law, but also complain that the US government violates international law on a daily basis. Do you think that Russia and China are not willing to violate international law in places like the Ukraine or Nepal? Even leaving aside the clear misunderstanding of how international law works, the argument falls apart because the countries the OP is asking about routinely ignore the thing you say is the reason for NK’s autonomy being respected.
The North Korean leadership is perfectly aware of how to raise the cost of intervention and has been planning its defense around that strategy - artillery against Seoul (a non-military target,) nukes, etc. - with an eye on deterring Western intervention of that sort.
North Korea is often depicted as a crazy, loony, out-of-its-mind mental asylum, but I believe that, underneath all of that bluster and ridiculous behavior and colorful statements lies a regime that is cold-blooded, rational, logical and pragmatic. They know what could topple them, and how to prevent that from happening. I really do think that, at the end of the day most of the North Korean leadership has an accurate grasp of the situation and of reality.
Incidentally, I’ve wondered why North Korea doesn’t intentionally send hundreds of thousands of refugees northwards into China. It would mean fewer mouths to feed and also be a way of coercing China.
Because they know the Chinese would NOT be amused by an attempt to “coerce” them. (AIUI, those who already DO flee across the Yalu are not exactly treated nicely by the Chinese, either. )
Maybe because the Chinese would machine gun the refugees walking across the border?
There are already lots and lots of North Korean refugees who made it across the border and are living the good life as an undocumented alien in China. They didn’t walk across the border, they sneaked across. Anyone trying to just walk across is going be turned back or shot.
China would just send them back. It’s not like the NK army could do anything about it.
The NK retaliation to a preemptive strike might result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans and wide devastation. If there is a way to attack with enough force and suddenness to save some of those lives, it would require killing a huge number of innocent North Koreans. And acting so barbarically would play right into our enemies’ hands in the court of world opinion.
“Noble acts” and “freeing millions” might be worthwhile objectives, but North Korea isn’t the right place to try.
IIRC, the Iraqis were not starving. People opposed to Saddam (or women who ran into his sons) were in trouble, but women in general and Christians had more rights than in most Islamic states. Iraq was less brutal and more efficient than NK. Still brutal sure, but no comparison really.
In addition to the other responses, one of China’s prime reasons for not wanting the NK regime to fall is that they don’t want to deal with the refugees.
And I don’t blame China. NO ONE wants to deal with a bunch of half-starved, brain-washed North Koreans.
SK has programs in place to take care of NK defectors. Or should I say people that escape.
It takes months to try to get those folks to try to assimilate to a society where you have to make your own decisions about life.
Where you live.
Where you go to school.
Who you can marry.
Where you can travel (Pyongyang is out of reach for most)
Where you work and what your job will be.
How to earn money to live your life (though the black market is starting to thrive in NK)
Of course any religion is out of the question, except to revere the Kim dynasty.
None of those choices are available for the majority of NK’s. I’m sure it’s overwhelming to be free.
If they make it to China, and If they don’t get captured and put into servitude. Many end up in Seoul. An incredibly vibrant fast moving society.
Most that want to leave NK want to go to SK, the language is the same, and some have relatives. But the contrast to fit in is difficult.
Dr. Arthias’ opening query, is essentially the same thinking behind a lot of the “Neocons.” That is, that once the USSR fell apart, and China already started moving towards capitalism, doesn’t that mean that there are now just a tiny few “bad egg” countries left? Shouldn’t we be able to make a quick trip here and there, take out the evil little nasties, and then sit back and enjoy the dawning of a new age of true world peace?
It wasn’t ever openly stated, but I suspect that the original intent of the GWBush administration, was to do just that. Since we already occupied Afghanistan, go ahead and take out Saddam, then Syria, then Iran, thus bring the entire Middle East mess to an end. Then go after North Korea and Cuba as the only remaining truly communist countries left.
But that all went down the drain, when it turned out that Iraq’s people actually WEREN’T waiting to cheer and throw confetti on foreign soldiers marching through their country, Russia WAS prepared to fight on Syria’s side, and the American people were NOT willing to pay for this very expensive fantasy after all.
An actual quick history of how North Korea came to be left alone, goes like this:
it came into being, because the USSR wanted to take advantage of WW2 to conquer lots of border countries, and make them into communist allies. They weren’t quite strong enough to hold on to ALL of Korea, so they negotiated for half of it with an exhausted United States.
in 1950, the North attacked the South, in an effort to reunify the country the old fashioned way, but the UN opposed them (due to the USSR idiotically walking out in protest, instead of simply using their veto power to stop the UN from acting, as they usually did).
after a long, expensive, and nasty series of battles, as the US was close to completely crushing the North out of existence, the Chinese joined in in force, and almost drove the South to extinction. The war was finally stopped (but never ended) by a truce, with the battle lines of that moment being set as borders.
after that, the American people had thoroughly lost the political will to fight and die for nothing, so we turned to other concerns. The same thing happened later in Viet Nam.
Since then, the overall narrative the US operated under regarding the North, was that they were harmlessly bottled up, not a threat to us, and backed up by two HUGE big brothers who we didn’t want to take on. Other concerns took attention off Korea until after the fall of the USSR, which almost no one saw coming. By that time, the Middle East had become our primary focus, and North Korea was nothing but an annoying side note.
During that time, the North managed to develop their own nukes, making the whole neocon fantasy even tougher to sell. And when the gambit of trying to turn the ME into Little America, by arranging for the deaths of Saddam and other ME bad guys turned out to be the dream of an insane clown (by which I am NOT referring to anyone in particular), we arrived where we are now.
And where we are now, is, yeah, we could do the insane amount of international negotiating required to make it okay to take out the NK, and we could spend the trillions of dollars that would be eaten up with zero returns doing so, and we could make an even bigger mess of our international relations with Russia and China and the rest of the world than they already are.
But unfortunately, the American People as a whole, aren’t turned on enough by the fantasy of being able to say “North What?” to make us willing to do all that.
Nope. We invaded Iraq under false pretenses with the intention of causing suffering. Nothing in my original post suggests that we should ever do that again.
It’s the basic premise of the Marxist view of history: everything gets reduced to monetary terms. In a way, Marx was the biggest capitalist ever: to him, all of human activity is capital-related activity.
For a North Korean, “escaping” to China is the worst option, unless there is a large “Underground Railroad” type of system that they can contact without making any overt moves.
I know of no such system to smuggle DPRK’ers to sanctuary.
If the Chinese State (at any level - esp. local police) get them, they are sent back to NK where they and their entire families are sent to slave labor camps - for 3 generations, as I understand it.
Maybe the US can make a deal with China: “You take out the Kim’s and destroy the Kim Mythology and let the NK people figure out what they (and you) can live with, and we won’t install THAAD within 5000 km (or whatever) of your border”.
China will not accept the North being subsumed into the South - ant more than the US would let China absorb Mexico as “West China”. A US military ally of the US on China’s border will not fly.
Maybe we can make a deal - US/China takes out the NK leadership (decapitation strike) and them make DPRK a UN-administered territory.China gets veto power over selection of PM (don’t call it “President”) for 75 years or the territory becomes politically independent.
But there are indeed such stories. Some North Koreans get stuck in clandestinity in China, but there are routes by which people have managed to get out to South Korea from China. There aren’t many alternative routes, unless they’re out of North Korea officially already and defect.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/18/christianity-defectors-escape-route-north-korea
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/05/north-koreas-stateless-children
And this happens so frequently that, when it does, it is considered news - even on the other side of the globe.
I wouldn’t say they ‘respect’ North Korea. They just fear the damage they could do.
North Korea has many trump cards it can use to cause massive pain and suffering to other countries in the form of property damage, lives lost, injuries, destruction, etc.
So nobody wants to do anything because NK will harm a lot of people.
Russia and China wouldn’t join a coalition to overthrow them. South Korean doesn’t want them overthrown because that would make South Korea responsible for the mess that Kim has left behind.
The best outcome is for China to stage a silent coup in NK, eliminate the kim regime and start rebuilding North Korea they way they did in China with market reforms and civil rights reforms.
When did China reform it’s civil rights? You mean switching from a one child to a two child policy? Other than that, I can’t think of what civil rights reforms they have done.
I suppose anything would be better than what the North Koreans currently have, but I wouldn’t say that having China take over and model them after China would be ‘the best outcome’…it would just be less bad than what they have now.