We have not done that in North Korea.
The argument "food doesn't work, so we'll just kill them" is heinous. Not gonna bother with your other points for that reason.
The argument "food doesn't work, so we'll just kill them" is heinous. Not gonna bother with your other points for that reason.
No one said, "we'll just kill them". The good thing is that NK is unlikely to kill us, since if it tries it won't survive as a political entity.
That is called "deterrence".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
Perhaps NK shouldn't have been the aggressor and gotten a bunch of citizens killed... How many South Koreans do you suppose would rather NK had won?
Not only was North Korea the aggressor in the Korean War, it was not the United States acting unilaterally that opposed it but the United Nations. This was one of the only times in history that the United Nations declared war on a nation acting as a clear aggressor. Had the United Nations not intervened, then we would see an entire Korean peninsula run as foolishly and cruelly as the North is.
The DPRK's mythologizing of the war has done nothing but dig the North Korean people in general and the Kim regime in particular, into an ideological hole that they can't really get out of.
Congress then reneged on the deal. Three years later, Bush gave his famous axis of evil speech, and invaded one of the countries on the list.
Unsurprisingly, having taken one look at what happened to Saddam Hussein, and because it's not ran by suicidal morons, North Korea resumed their nuclear program.
Have we all collectively forgotten the past 19 years?
Major reasons for the breakdown of the Agreed Framework was that DPRK was never abiding by it to begin with. I mean it really shouldn't be up to the United States to bribe DPRK into not pursuing nuclear weapons; North Korea should just respect its preexisting agreements with South Korea and rely on its relationships with China and Russia for nuclear deterrence the same as South Korea relies on the United States. It's no coincidence that talks broke down at around the same time that the North Korean famine started to subside.
That speech by Bush, foolish as it was, was not given in a void. It was a response to decades of belligerence by the DPRK. The reason Saddam got invaded was because he deliberately mislead people about his weapons programs. If North Korea was a less belligerent entity, they would be having a much easier time dealing with the United States.
The United States also should not be making demands of the DPRK at gunpoint. If some agreement could not be reached, it would have bombed the Yongbyon reactor.
The NNPT is a voluntary agreement - one that its key signatories are arguably in violation of.
> That speech by Bush, foolish as it was, was not given in a void. It was a response to decades of belligerence by the DPRK.
The belligerence was not in a void. The country underwent a devastating war, and was subjected to decades of economic and political marginalisation, with the constant threat of another war hanging over it.
If the United States was less belligirent towards North Korea, they would also have a much easier time dealing with them. This is, of course, not a notion that is even entertained by the Department of State.
Pretty much everyone involved in this cesspool is smeared in shit. No-one comes out looking good.
If by 'decades of economic and political marginalisation' you mean it was on the Soviet side in the Cold War, then you are correct. But during that time DPRK had a strong alliance with the Soviet Union which provided them with enormous resources. Their economy was almost on par with the South. It wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the 90s, that this changed and it was Korean belligerence in the 90s and 2000s that lead to the current state of affairs.
"The country underwent a devastating war"
Using the Korean war as justification for current North Korean foreign and domestic policies is as morally bankrupt as using the First World War as justification for Hitler's foreign and domestic policies. The DPRK has been the aggressor from the beginning.
"The NNPT is a voluntary agreement - one that its key signatories are arguably in violation of."
They signed other agreements... https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/KR%2...
"The United States also should not be making demands of the DPRK at gunpoint."
That strongly depends on the kind of demand being made. If the United States was demanding economic concessions, you'd be right, but that's the situation. The situation is that North Korea is making demands at gunpoint and is attempting to make even more devastating threats. In these negotiations, the United States has never threatened to attack North Korea's civilian population, nor has it threatened to use nuclear weapons. North Korea however, has done exactly the opposite.
There is no parity between North Korea's and the United States' actions here.