YouTube Channel Polymater had a video about how NK would basically follow a' eternal cycle of "firing missiles to annoy everyone" / "get sanctionned" / "negociate with the Us by promising to stop launching missiles" / "get sanctions lifted" / rinse and repeat.
The cycle would go on forever, as long as China would not ditch support for NK. And of course, China would never get rid of such a powerful way to annoy everyone else.
NK would never actually attack, as it would kill their bluff and give everyone a good reason to convince China to wipe them out.
So this would be yet another episode. It's not "Mutually Assured Destruction", but "Perpetually Assured Annoyance".
> China would never get rid of such a powerful way to annoy everyone else.
I've mentioned this in another comment, but you're severely underestimating the real relationship between North Korea and China. For the government, maybe it is only a strategic relationship, but if you talk to anyone who grew up in China there is a real feeling of kinship with the people that live in NK.
For a long time there has been a lot of cultural exchange between the nations and many Chinese near the border are indistinguishable culturally from North Koreans.
An attack on North Korea, even if a justifiable retaliation, would feel like an attack on the Chinese people for a great many everyday people in China.
The closest analog to the US would be Canada. Most American's, especially in the North, feel that Canadians are very culturally similar. Many people in far Northern states have friends and family in Canada. Overall the bond is much closer than with Mexico, which has more culture, ethnic and linguistic differences.
Imagine if Canada were ruled by a despot, who then irrationally launched a nuclear strike on another country. Even if American's were to feel that that was wrong, we would also still likely strongly defend Canadian people from aggressive retaliation. And this analogy is far from perfect, the sense I've gotten in conversations with Chinese about North Korea is that they're much closer.
I've seen this mentioned in a documentary about people fleeing North Korea via China and Thailand as well, and they need to hide themselves from the Chinese as much as they do the DPRK border guards.
> An attack on North Korea, even if a justifiable retaliation, would feel like an attack on the Chinese people for a great many everyday people in China.
I lived in Beijing for a while and I can’t say I agree with this. For sure, China is an enormous country with much cultural surface area, so I could be wrong.
But this does not strike me as an obvious conclusion.
USA afraid of communisms spread. Sends MacArthur to Korea. He crushes the Korean communists. USA believes it to be a clean sweep. Mao surprise s USA with massive army encirclement of USA forces. USA forced to flee south and hold the line that became demarcation between north and south.
There is a 0% chance China would allow the USA to take NK.
They also love provoking Japan. Their entire origin story is about fighting against the Japanese in the 30s.
I'm not entirely sure that lessons from 70 years ago are strictly applicable today. Sure, there is some memetic carryover, but all the people in charge then are dead now.
If NK actually launches an attack on a "western" country, full war will begin. If China decides to get involved, that's really on them. I wish it were otherwise, but that's how it is.
> There is a 0% chance China would allow the USA to take NK.
Agreed. This, however, was not the substance of my comment.
The US would not tolerate an attack on Israel/Taiwan/others. That doesn’t mean that if China attacked Taiwan, the average American would feel like they had been attacked.
I don’t think it makes sense to go to Taiwan or Israel for analogy; The Average American didnt bleed for either of those places like they did in Korea.
But, I think the Canada invasion analogy is also even too weak; Canada doesn’t exist because of the USA like NK does because of the CCP.
You're way overselling this. This commentary is true maybe for the northern part of China close to the Korean peninsula. Southern China doesn't give a rats ass what happens to Korea.
To be clear : first, this is only a theory from a YouTuber
I did not bother to provide it as a source, because I just found the theory entertaining, and at the same time more realistic than "we're permanently on the verge of ww3 because of a small country with nothing more than nuisance power"
I tend to agree with you that a unilateral attack on NK would cause a terrible reaction from China ; the point of the PAA theory is that such an attack would never occur, until China, for some reason, has drop support to the NK régime ('Big countries dropping support on some protege' does not look like an impossible occurrence - I'm pretty sure there are précedents.)
The NK situation is one of the many that will not be solved on a social network.
> YouTube Channel Polymater had a video about how NK would basically follow a' eternal cycle ...
Tips of the day, don't put too much trust into Youtube videos. There are just random dudes/girls who are good with a video editor. And most of the content they produce is either from Wikipedia or their own random opinion.
And for something as serious are NK I wouldn't trust anything that is said by a youtube video
It's been like this for 6 decades, also worth noting that one of the major party in SK relies on this behavior for its co-dependent "prosperity".. Once, it even paid NK to bluff like this just before the presidential election for the sake of power consolidation. It was a huge and messy scandal.
I find that relationship basically a parasite and host, and now they're likely going to win for election in next year.
Aka "Time for the regular aid request". Either from China for being a good pe(s)t or the UN and US for promising to stop nuclear tests.
The fact that their population suffers famine nearly every goddamn year is just unbelievably sad.
How those people put up with it, I don't understand. They really managed to create a feudal country in a modern world. Could others do the same if left unchecked?
>How those people put up with it, I don't understand.
People en masse are willfully gullible when it comes for propaganda. Just look at the vaccine mandates.
I myself is from USSR, and when i see photos from NK i see that my past, and i really don't know how they today (or we back then) could get out of that situation until the system crumbles on its own.
>Could others do the same if left unchecked?
Do you see any other way for Afghanistan for example?
I don't think they were necessarily referring to getting rid of NK as much as NK's tactic of firing missiles. China could presumably influence to NK to not launch missiles at neighbors while still supporting it as a separate state, it's just not in their interest to do that either.
>China could presumably influence to NK to not launch missiles at neighbors.
Very questionable. If you read about the Rangoon bombing[0] the short of it is the Chinese passed on a note from the NKs to the Americans requesting trilateral talks, essentially vouching for them, just prior to the bombing. Apparently, Deng Xaiping said afterwards he'd never let 'that motherfucker' (Kim Jong Il) set foot on chinese soil as long as he lived, and apparently, KJI never did.
NK is a wildcard that China doesn't have a great way to get out of. They're just as likely to annoy China for more aid as they are to annoy other countries to remove sanctions.
All of the pathways to a rational NK have outcomes that China would not like including both collapse of the North Korean state, hostility between China and NK or variations on unification between SK and NK. The only stable option is to work with NK too slowly migrate towards a modern Chinese communism approach over the span of decades through the use of aid money, advisors, economic exchange, and educational programs. This only risks periodic regression via purges within North Korea.
If you want to understand more about the current situation with North Korea and its strategic forces I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast. Also lots of cool info about open source intelligence!
North Korea makes nice sound bites, but I won't be surprised if Japan is secretly more worried about South Korea. The same day, South Korea successfully tested SLBM[1].
These days, NK is pretty much a convenient excuse for South Korea and Japan to beef up their military. Of course there's very little chance they'll fight in near future (the US will never allow it), but either country will still want to have enough firepower as bargaining chip: even at the best of days, you can never completely rely on the US being your benevolent protector.
Despite the historical enmity, it seems that the public viewpoint towards Japan is shifting in SK though:
> Political elites here are usually careful not to antagonize China, the country’s largest trading partner. But Mr. Yoon’s blunt rhetoric reflected a new phenomenon: a growing antipathy toward Beijing among South Koreans, particularly young voters whom conservative politicians are eager to win over.
> Anti-Chinese sentiment has grown so much this year that China has replaced Japan — the former colonial ruler — as the country regarded most unfavorably in South Korea, according to a joint survey by the polling company Hankook Research and the Korean newsmagazine SisaIN. In the same survey, South Koreans said they favored the United States over China six to one.
You have to figure as the generations that were most affected by Japanese rule have died and are dying off, the new people see it as a historical thing that isn’t relevant. Look at Europe for example - people hit over their ancestors grievances.
The world turns and life goes on. People just want prosperity.
On the other hand, the scars of imperialism can be long lasting. One need only look at the legacy of the Holocaust (admittedly extreme example), or the colonization of north america.
Time can help the SK-Japanese relationship, but healing does not come easily or freely. Especially when Japan still hesitates to apologize for its past atrocities inflicted against Korea or other former colonies.
Japan ruled Korea 1910 to 1945 with all the brutality typical of imperial Japan. I'm not Korean, but I might bear a grudge if my grandfather had been worked to death in slavery, and my grandmother raped endlessly.
I was at a park in Seoul that had a mural running around it that illustrated very graphically this history. It was a very old mural. I think it becomes less an issue if it’s your great grandfather and less and less each generation removed.
I wouldn't say there's a military tension - well, other than the island of Dokdo (aka Takeshima) that's stupidly blown out of proportion, but I hope nobody's stupid enough to go to war over it.
However the two countries don't exactly have an amicable history. I hope we get along well with each other (and we kind of do, more or less), but Japan still has many right-wing politicians who downplay their past war crimes. On our side, some South Korean politicians love to use Japan as a convenient scapegoat and blame Korea's every social problem on past Japanese occupation.
It's less about direct military conflict between the two, and more about who gets a larger voice in any kind of issues. With the two Koreas, China, Russia, and Japan crammed in such a small area, East Asia is a tough place. You need to be seen as someone others cannot ignore.
SK doesn’t want a war with NK either their capital is way too close to the DMZ and NK artillery for comfort and even if they win without a lot of damage they have to deal with integrating the population of NK who are vastly less developed economically than the south.
>“What makes this test provocative is North Korea’s public statement that these cruise missiles are a ‘strategic’ weapon, implying an intention to miniaturize nuclear warheads to fit on them,”
For headline readers, this is the real significance.
Who knows what actually goes on in those meetings but it’s pretty clear that China sets the boundaries for NK, Kim wouldn’t alienate his lifeline too much. Doubtless China knows about them before they happen.
I wonder how quickly North Korea’s nuke problem would be solved, if the US quietly let China know that if NK stays nuclear, the US will support Japan and Taiwan developing nuclear weapons.
With Japan and Taiwan’s industrial sector and precision machinery, how long before they could develop nuclear bombs and ICBMs, maybe a few months?
The end result is that Taiwan would become a Chinese colony, Japan would get nukes to no appreciable geostrategic gain, and the entire economy would absolutely crater, killing millions of people.
Because of economic issues that would arise, as I touched on in the end. There's no reason for China not to wait 30 years to be in an even better position and create reliable enough supply chains and allies so that their economy cannot be rattled significantly by the US.
If you were going to give/allow Taiwan nuclear weapons to protect itself, you'd have wanted to do it decades ago. And you wouldn't support them in developing nuclear weapons, you'd want to have quietly slipped nukes into Taiwan several decades ago. China was far less advanced in the 1980s and 1990s, it might have been possible to arm Taiwan with nukes back then, before China could stop it. Today if China found out Taiwan were attempting to develop nuclear weapons, they'd either invade and conquer the island in rapid fashion (at whatever cost necessary), or potentially glass it entirely (that's a serious consideration for China, and a good reason not to give Taiwan nukes at this point).
>""I wonder how quickly North Korea’s nuke problem would be solved, if the US quietly let China know that if NK stays nuclear, the US will support Japan and Taiwan developing nuclear weapons."
I believe they call this the “beheading” scenario - a small group of PRC ninjas could infiltrate ROC and surgically remove the government, causing the nation to de-exist, after which a swift invasion takes place. It won’t take a full week and they won’t last weeks afterwards. Only protection against that is American presence in the region.
> Only protection against that is American presence in the region.
No, the only protection is Chinese belief that the US is willing to engage in full-scale war to protect Taiwan; “presence in the region” but not specifically at risk in Taiwan doesn't necessarily acheive that (ask Ukraine!)
Not even that. Full-scale war is preferable to nuclear Taiwan for them. The Chinese are very confident they could invade Taiwan before the US would be able to get through their A2/AD shield, and they would probably be right. In other words, they're quite confident they would win the war as far as Taiwan is concerned.
China sees a nuclear-armed Taiwan as an existential threat.
The US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq quite rapidly, it's the counterinsurgency that was the issue. That's not a problem for Taiwan, it's an island with nowhere for insurgents to hide or flee to.
In a China vs Taiwan conflict, the Taiwanese would lose any and all ports and airstrips in the first 6 hours, and would be completely unable to receive any US help from then on. The Taiwanese state is meanwhile so deeply infiltrated that there is no chance the nukes could arrive before the PRC knew.
Beyond that, both Afghanistan and Vietnam are countries thousands of kilometers away from the US that the average person absolutely doesn't care about and that pose zero real threat.
> I wonder how quickly North Korea’s nuke problem would be solved, if the US quietly let China know that if NK stays nuclear, the US will support Japan and Taiwan developing nuclear weapons.
You're describing a nightmarish nuclear arms race scenario [0].
It's unclear that NATO + Japan need to do anything. What is North Korea going to do, hit Tokyo? That would be the surest way to get Pyongyang "liberated" ASAP ...
Let’s say they don’t attack with nukes but just shoot small conventional warheads every now on then, like Israel and Gaza. It’s not enough justification to go for an all out war, being that NK have nukes.
The thing is, North Korea is right next to South Korea, so they don't need fancy missile to stir up trouble. Simple artillery is enough, as they actually did in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong
And, contrary to some popular theories, actually attacking your neighbor is not that useful for bargaining. All it does is to make other countries very angry and call for more hardline policies. So the best NK can do is keep its madman shtick, not actually use the missiles, and demand larger concessions. But other countries would want, in turn, some semblance of promise that NK will stop being so crazy if it gets economic aid. So we're back to stalemate.
Seoul is like 35mi from NK borders, or like 1.5 tiles in Civilization hexmap. It’s actually too far for IRL howitzers to set up and bombard the city but not comfortably. So it’s not a good idea to set them off when retaliation is expected.
With rocket assisted projectiles (RAP), North Korea's Koksan self propelled guns have a demonstrated range of 37 miles. Note that this is based on the performance of the guns observed during the Iran-Iraq war, and it is entirely possible that further improvements to range have been made in the past 30 years.
Also, it's 35 miles from the DMZ to the center of Seoul, but Seoul is a big city. There are parts of Seoul proper less than 25 miles from the DMZ, and the metropolitan area extends much closer still. Hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea live within comfortable artillery range of North Korea.
Not a civil war at all. Gazans aren't citizens of Israel, they have their own elections and government. But if you insist, you can switch "Gaza" to "Lebanon" which fires missiles at Israel every now and then as a nuisance (just did a few weeks ago).
It's a struggle for sovereignty over disputed land which has largely been under both sides at one point or another in recent history. "What about <pedantry>" doesn't need to apply here. The definitions and situation is fuzzy. The point is that it is a vastly different situation than China-supported DPRK firing missiles at Japanese population centers.
Yes, it's funny how there is a lot of fear about a country that attacked noone since the Korea War (and that didn't commit massacres during it unlike their opponent), especially when those people are from a country that have a carte blanche to attack other countries and do it on a regular basis.
NK rulers aren't idiots, they have access to the West (media and travel) and they know about the relative military strength and probably aren't to keen to have Democracy™ being forcefully implemented on them.
Give the N Korean leadership some assurance that the next president isn't going to do a u turn on a peace deal. N Korea just wants to survive. And America is an unreliable partner in peace.
That's the point that is never spoken about in complaints about NK's "belligerence". And that's how every country that did away with an WMD program that wasn't in the pocket of the West eventually became the target of Western aggression. Libya, Syria, Iraq all had some sort of nuclear weapons programs. And all were eventually attacked by the West because nuclear backed sovereignty is the only sovereignty respected by the West.
I'm not sure what the point of this question is. I stated that "nuclear sovereignty is the only sovereignty respected by the West" and then you ask "where is sovereignty respected in its own right". I'm not sure how that follows.
That is completely besides the point. It's a historical fact that countries with enimity to the west were much more willing to give up WMD programs before the downfall of those that did than nowadays.
There is a solution to North Korea as it stands today. Chaos will take care of the regime eventually. Chaos is undefeated when it comes to wiping out totalitarian systems (quick, name a couple dozen 100-300 year old totalitarian regimes that are thriving today). That system won't stand forever. Plan as best as possible for what to do whenever the Kim dynasty finally implodes, whenever it inevitably gets toppled from within.
The primary concern is a Myanmar style military junta, backed by China, taking over. Then you're more or less just back to square one. Unfortunately that's by far the most likely scenario. China has zero interest in seeing a unified Korea, in the model of South Korea, on its border - they will not allow it, and they have the capability to easily prevent it.
> (quick, name a couple dozen 100-300 year old totalitarian regimes that are thriving today)
That seems an unfair bar to set. There aren't dozens of liberal democracies with that long a history, either.
The flagship oldest democracies (Athens, Revolutionary France) didn't last any longer than that. Arguably the USA is doing the best at 250-ish years.
I don't dispute that NK's juche seems less likely to be stable in the long term than, say, Switzerland, but this seems the wrong way to go about the argument.
War. War is the only thing that could still work. Of course, advocating for war, even against a country as dangerous as North Korea, is a huge taboo in our public discourse. But it is the only solution left to the North Korean problem.
Or even if it happens before NK is a credible nuclear threat, Seoul is in range of thousands of heavy artillery emplacements that'll get at least one shot off. There's not really a counter to artillery shells like you can use for rockets like the iron dome, so Seoul would be pretty much guaranteed to be leveled, with countless dead.
Since WWII, US never fought a war with the stated goal of winning at all costs. Modern wars are limited scale conflicts designed to have soft outcomes (e.g regime changes) rather than hard outcomes (annihilation of your adversary).
I feel like most people don't realize how close China and NK are. This is probably because the media doesn't discuss this link much. China would never let NK attack another country let alone launch nuclear missiles any more than the US allowing a Nato state to randomly attack another country it didn't like.
I feel like we're inching our way toward waking up one morning to find North Korea wiped off the planet. Perhaps not as drastic but I can't imagine they're going to withstand a barrage of counterattacks.
But I'm not a military person whatsoever so what do I know.
The goal of North Korea is not to build a self-defense that could withstand US/NATO invasion. It's to pose a credible enough retaliation so any outside invasion attempts would never be worth the cost. Demonstrations such as this are just North Korea declaring "we can nuke Tokyo if we want, are we really worth that?". Thereby North Korea's ruling class are insulated from being externally overthrown, and can focus all their efforts on suppressing internal threats. Unless something dramatic changes, North Korea is not going to be "wiped off the planet" anytime soon.
Right. What NK is doing is rational and in their best interests to maintain their regime.
At this point I’d say it’s time to forget the post WW2 world and just recognize it makes no sense today to have the types of agencies and structures we’ve built in that world.
Normalize relations with them, open up trade, and try and build trust. It’s literally a pointless policy today. We do business with communists. We do business with despots.
North Korea's military strategy is built around retribution. If South Korea and the US were to launch an attack on North Korea they would eventually win, but the costs in military and civilian (both North and South Korean) casualties would be so extreme as to make it not worthwhile. As an example: North Korea has thousands of artillery pieces positioned near the border, which are capable of striking targets fairly deep in South Korean territory. A number of them can strike into Seoul. And they are situated in tunnels in the side of mountains, well stocked with plenty of ammunition. The artillery pieces stay in the tunnels, pop out to fire a round, and roll back in to be reloaded. They can fire into high population areas and can hit a number of important military installations near the border. Plus, North Korea is able to produce chemical weapons, and is believed to have chemical artillery rounds stockpiled. Estimates are that it would take a South Korean-Japanese-US combined air force weeks to find and neutralize all those positions. You also have some fairly rough terrain in North Korea, which is not very suitable to large-scale armored and mechanized assaults. Any invasion would also have to face a population that has been indoctrinated for generations to hate and fear South Koreans, Japanese, and Americans. Long range cruise missiles like these give the North Koreans additional options for retribution against such an attack. There's even speculation that North Korea may implement nuclear landmines, essentially placing nuclear warheads near the border to be detonated if an invasion were to overrun that position.
In short, any potential invasion or regime change of North Korea would be a very long and very bloody affair, unless there are some serious changes in the status quo. Which is exactly what Kim Jung Un wants. He doesn't have any real ambitions to re-unite the Korean peninsula, or to liberalize the nation and re-enter the world stage. His only goal is maintaining power, which is exactly what this is.
you'd think if the US was good enough to fake the moon landing and hide the fact the world is flat, they'd be able to make North Korea disappear without anyone realizing it
I always find NK as a threat such a silly idea. The moment things escalated to anything real they'd be wiped out or even if they did manage to put up a fight they seem so resource constrained that it'd be over within weeks. I can only imagine the reason it keeps being hovered over our head is because the US needs an enemy and russia and china are too powerful to put in that position anymore (but what do I know I'm just speculating).
China wants a buffer zone between them and south Korea. USA tells china make sure NK does not do anything to crazy. And yes if NK attacked south Korea they could kill lots of people.. but after that the USA would carpet bomb them until nothing was left. One of the above comments is very accurate. Basically NK Will not attack. And NK Will exist for as long as china sees value in it.
I thought for a long time that the north korean government acts so "crazy" is to hide this fact. If they were acting "sane", they wouldn't be taken seriously because of the massive power imbalance and the extreme retribution problem regarding nukes.
NK has a very complex relationship with China and I'm fairly sure they would not be "wiped out" immediately.
Even in the extreme case of North Korea nuking Japan, it would still lead to an extremely complex international situation. The US retaliating for Japan with a nuclear strike or any similar situation of extreme force would be a far too risky of a move.
Not only is NK important to China strategically as a buffer between themselves and the US friendly South Korea, but the Chinese people feel a kinship with the people of NK, not entirely dissimilar to the way the US views Canada culturally. Aggressive retaliation would unquestionably make China an aggressive and active enemy of the US (or whoever decided it was their job to retaliate).
North Korea's proximity to China, not just physically but culturally as well, makes the issue far more complex than if a rogue nation where make similar threats.
North Korea is currently hoping that their ICBMs mean they can toss around nukes in their back yard while not having to worry about the US nuking them back. If they can take out enemy seaports and air bases they might possibly have a chance against the conventional forces already arrayed against them in the Korean peninsula. It's, well, it's a terrible plan but maybe credible enough to dissuade the West from thoughts of regime change.
You realize NK is basically an offshoot of China, right?
"They have a close special relationship and China is often considered to be North Korea's closest ally. China and North Korea have a mutual aid and co-operation treaty, which is currently the only defense treaty either country has with any nation." [0]
Controversial opinion: the United States and South Korea should have gone to war with North Korea during the 1990s, when North Korea was at its weakest, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. North Korea did not have nuclear weapons then. Doing so might have cost the lives of thousands of South Korean civilians, but North Korea would not have nuclear weapons today, or an army of cyber criminals, and the future peril of war with a nuclear armed North Korea would have been staved off forever. The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care, as long as NK ceased having a national government and armed forces of its own. Most reasonable people will agree that having one fewer nuclear power would be a gift for global peace and stability.
They say to give peace a chance. Maybe, in some situations, it is war that should be given a chance.
US was pretty close to a preemptive strike in the 90s.
There were estimates of massive SK casualties just via artillery strikes. (1M+, Seoul destroyed, ...). NK also had chemical/biological weapons...
There was also always a threat of nuclear escalation via China if US went too far...
> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care
China wants what is currently in place, it's doubtful they would have not intervened as they did in Korean war after which war becomes one of attrition and keeping the Chinese out of SK...
The joke is: "when US claimed you have wmd, you better actually have it"...
NK has been behaving quite bad comparing to some other countries that got US invasion. The reason that they were not invaded, is mostly that they indeed have the stuff that can scare away US.
Yeah. Living in South Korea with the threat from North Korea in the 90s was probably the closest I'll come to (well, hopefully the closest I'll come to) to understanding what it was like for my parents' generation (Baby Boomers) growing up with the constant threat (real or perceived) of nuclear war.
NK was almost certainly not going to initiate a war, but they had everything in place to decimate SK if one began by the 90s at least.
Initially? Successfully. Coalition forces overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's baathist government in Iraq. It was the subsequent occupation and nation-building stage where things became hairy.
Which is why I suggested to hand off North Korea to China once its government has been defeated. China will use the cheap labor and vast mineral resources of the country, NK's citizens will see major improvements in their quality of life.
That Saddam Hussein seems like a very bad man.
We should prosecute all those who helped him come to power, and keep him there, supplying him with weapons etc.
Same with the Taliban.
To overthrow the Taliban means destroying them. They only retreated. You declared victory foolishly way too early. You didn't realize this was a decades struggle and, of course, lost that conflict.
You also lost Iraq considering you killed 200,000 innocent men, women, and children, setup a terrible government, and a military that conceded so much, ISIS took over large parts of the country and neighboring countries. You had to start yet another war to clean up and now are just awaiting the next ISIS-like event because you destabilized an entire region.
These wars were total and utter disasters and crimes against humanity. Stop defending them.
The US did not lose in Iraq and it didn't kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Iraq today is a free-standing nation, capable of charting their own path, courtesy of their significant oil revenues. The US is no longer required to prop them up and the US does not dictate their policies nor does it occupy the nation.
The civilian deaths you're referring to were the result of a civil war between the Iraqi people. They were killing each other. The long oppressed Shia majority and the Sunni minority. That's not uncommon throughout history, see: US, Russian, French civil wars, to name a few prominent examples. The US also butchered itself in a civil war, we were no better in our internal conflict. The French, British and other European powers were not morally responsible for those deaths, despite the elaborate roles the European empires played in helping to cause the US civil war (eg European slavery), as well as influencing or shaping the US colonies and infant US nation.
It took many decades for the US to organize itself properly after its founding, it was a very messy process. And even then, it ended up in a bloody civil war, before a greater degree of stability was achieved. Why should Iraq be held to the absurd expectation of instantaneous, miraculous stability so soon after regaining their independence from Saddam's dictatorship and then the chaotic US & allied forces occupation? Iraq is commonly treated quite unfairly in judgment when it comes to a political process that can take a long time under the best of circumstances; they're held to an unreasonable standard that just about no nation could live up to, especially given the context.
>The civilian deaths you're referring to were the result of a civil war between the Iraqi people.
If I set a house on fire, any deaths that result from people trampling each other or jumping out of windows are my fault. If I claimed they liked each other or committed suicide, I'd be laughed out of court and (rightly) into prison.
> Doing so might have cost the lives of thousands of South Korean civilians
It would have been closer to hundreds of thousands. And it would have cost tens of thousands of American lives as well. To defeat and pacify North Korea you'd have to occupy the nation with an enormous military force, upwards of a million total soldiers or more. That's assuming China tolerated it, which is very unlikely. The terrain in North Korea is almost ideal for guerilla fighters, and it would present a brutal challenge to any occupying forces.
China was significantly responsible for making North Korea what it is today. They like having North Korea as a stick to poke the US, South Korea and Japan with. North Korea is a wildcard that makes the region very complicated and dangerous for the anti-China alliance. They have very little interest in seeing it dismantled. If China had wanted North Korea, they would have taken it a long time ago; it's a rather trivial bit of land next to China; but in its present use, North Korea can be exceptionally useful to China, it's a net positive asset in its present form. They're already a quasi vassal of China, they're hyper dependent on China for almost everything. China gets a lot of upside from the arrangement, with few downsides.
> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care
Absolutely not. That's among the worst things the US and South Korea could have done. Assisting China in territorial expansion, de facto helping China to conquer another part of Asia, would be grotesque.
There's no moral argument for claiming other nations have a right to dictate to the North Korean people that they are not to have their own nation. The two Koreas have been separate for a long time now, it's not like that separation just happened a few decades ago. If they want to unite with South Korea, then they should be allowed to. If they don't want to, that should be respected as well. Forcibly handing them off to China and dissolving their nation without their input would be an extreme violation of human rights.
North Korea as a nation belongs, properly, to the people of North Korea. Not to China. Not to the US. Not to South Korea.
I might buy the self-determination point of view if the ordinary people of North Korea had any input on their governance, which they hardly do. North Korea is ruled by the Kim family like a monarchy. There are no elections, no referendums, no multiparty system.
It does not matter. The people have to figure it out. Opposition and subsequent toppling of the authoritarian government should be a natural course without any external influence.
War was give a chance and the North won, with of course China threatening to move in on the action as well as the Soviet Union. UN forces continuing to fight in that region over the long debunked "domino theory" would have led to WWWIII, perhaps even a nuclear holocaust for what? Some peninsula? Same with Vietnam which the US lost? Its not worth it.
Revising that was decades later would have been political impossible, ethically evil, and set off the same China/SU hostility chain that leads to WWIII.
We are constantly giving war a chance. The problem is we rarely give peace a chance. Imagine if instead of blowing up children and women in Afghanistan for two decades we asked the Taliban to the parliamentary table and built a government with them? They'd be the most powerful party, but it would have saved tens of thousands of innocent civilians lives and literally everything would be better off today there. but instead we listened to people like you, fought a foolish war, put in a "democracy" that, of course, failed within weeks. The same way it would have in NK, assuming a second NK conflict wouldn't lead to WWIII, which it most likely would.
Remember when you say go to war, you're asking the West to murder hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. America is happy to do that and calls its "democracy" but they are simply crimes against humanity writ large. The war on terror has at least 380,000 innocent civilians killed. Stop killing people. Stop making war the default goto. Give peace chance. Its not your job to be the world police or tell China or NK what to do. You're just a bloodthirsty keyboard commando who wants to contribute to crimes against humanity. If I was you I'd reflect on what you've written today and think about why you're carrying water for the mass murder and human rights violation machine we call the US military.
what a false dichotomy. 1. why does the US get to make this choice for others, and 2. the actual outcomes are nothing like this, name the countries the US destabilized that are now bastions of human rights. the track record is horrendous and the only reason we have not been rightfully forbidden from meddling is brute force.
For a while, women in Afghanistan could be educated and visible in public again, like 70 years ago.
If you choose not to intervene, you have still made a choice.
"Never Again", yet Rwandan genocide, Serbian massacre, Uyghurs in camps, Darfur, Syria, Daesh, Qatari slaves... whether you intervene or not people will suffer.
The cycle would go on forever, as long as China would not ditch support for NK. And of course, China would never get rid of such a powerful way to annoy everyone else.
NK would never actually attack, as it would kill their bluff and give everyone a good reason to convince China to wipe them out.
So this would be yet another episode. It's not "Mutually Assured Destruction", but "Perpetually Assured Annoyance".