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Comment by Despegar | Hacker News Reader

It's time for the US to end the sanctions on North Korea. The abuse workers face is a straight line result from the fact that virtually all aspects of their economy are under total embargo. North Korea is a nuclear state, and they will never go back to not being one. North Koreans have been working in China for decades and that won't change either because China is not going to let them become a failed state.

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Dictatorships should be starved out so they don't pose a threat to the rest of us.

Expecting them to behave by sending them money is a failed theory.

EU here, not US. I don't want my money to fund the killings of our Ukrainian friends.

Don't they first need to get along with their neighbors to the South?

They have for decades since the armistice agreement was signed in 1953 after the Korean War.

Wikipedia disagrees:

"In February–March 2021, South Korea continued to omit North Korea's "enemy" status from the South Korean military's White Paper after downgrading the status of Japan"

It gets worse from there.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93South_Kore...

How is "South Korea no longer rules them an enemy" disagreeing? Surely that's a sign of them getting along.

From the Wikipedia article, this is how:

During his election campaign in 2021, Yoon Suk Yeol said that he would ask that the United States to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea if there is a threat from North Korea.[162] U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Japan and Korea Mark Lambert rejected Yoon's call, saying said the proposal was against U.S. policy.[163]

In November 2022, a US-South Korean air force exercise named Vigilant Storm was countered by North Korea by missile tests and an air force exercise.[164]

In November 2023, both the Koreas suspended the Comprehensive Agreement Pact - a pact aimed at lowering tensions between the two countries - which was signed at the September 2018 inter-Korean summit, after North Korea launched a satellite into space.[165]

On January 15, 2024, Kim Jong Un announced that peaceful reunification was no longer possible and proposed identifying South Korea as a hostile state in the North Korean constitution. It was also announced that North Korea would dissolve the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the Mount Kumgang International Tourism Administration.[166]

Apparently you have a higher standard for "get along" than I do. I think not being actively at war for decades qualifies.

Definitely, yes. I'd say that the US has a better relationship with China than North Korea has with South Korea. The US and China get along, while disagreeing and even being in a trade war. North and South Korea are in a stalemate - peace was never declared and they have guns pointed at each other at all times.

all I can see is that their borders have been very peaceful comparing to other part of the world.

> It's time for the US to end the sanctions on North Korea. The abuse workers face is a straight line result from the fact that virtually all aspects of their economy are under total embargo.

Come on. Their workers are abused because North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship, not because of sanctions.

If sanctions have any contribution, it's pushing the abuse outside of North Korea, which makes it more visible and possible to investigate.

The argument in favor of this is that the current tensions are largely economic, and when the North Korean citizens can benefit from something closer full participation in world trade, they will be better off. Iran is in a similar situation and we had started down this path, only to be completely undone and set back 20 years by trump.

> Iran is in a similar situation and we had started down this path

Liberals believe this very much, and I sincerely wish it were true. But it's really not. Iran was simply taking advantage of what they could get, there was zero chance of them changing.

Iran is currently in the center, or at least involved, in so many conflicts I can barely list them all. (Yemen, Israel, Russia, Syria, Iraq, just to start with.)

You really believe they are doing this just because of Trump?

The sanctions are abusive, but what is the alternative? To allow a kingdom that is so pro-depravity to subsist unmolested?

And, is it a matter of sanctions, or national policy that causes the most pain? We don’t have a lot of data, but we have some: that I know of, there are three countries in the world with extensive sanctions. One of them, Russia, hasn’t been communist in three decades. I heard that there is political repression there, but despite the sanctions, not starvation or even economic hardship.

The other two countries, Cuba and North Korea, are still communist. North Korea is not doing well. And Cuba is hanging from a thread; citizens survive thanks to direct support from their expats to the families at home, but the country’s infrastructure is ruined. In terms of modern commodities, 19th century Europe had way less access to trade than sanctioned Cuba, and yet made better roads and enjoyed better postal services and a much vibrant financial sector.

The level and type of sanctions directed at Russia have been nowhere near what those others face. Until the recent war broke out the west was happily doing almost ever kind of business with Russia and even now many of these connections remain. There was even a big push to open economic relations throughout the 90s.

? Containment on imperial systems was removed. Russia invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. China colonized Hong Kong, uighurs, north Korea. Iran colonized Iraq, Yemen, Syria. Your liberal experiments have successfully brought back the world of 1910. And yet you endorse them..

Number of wars started by North Korea in the last 70 years: 0.

Number of wars started by the US in the timeframe: hold my beer.

Also Hong-Kong have been Chinese for centuries, before being colonized by the UK.

NK is heavily involved in Ukraine.

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