North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) watches a long range rocket launch into the air in North Korea, in this photo released by Kyodo February 7, 2016. Mandatory credit REUTERS/Kyodo
Tom Malinowski, Politico: How to Take Down Kim Jong Un
Stop saying there are no good options on North Korea. Here’s how we can end the threat once and for all—without firing a shot.
At my Senate confirmation hearing a few years ago, I made a promise to the panel deciding my fate: never to use the phrase “there are no good options.” After all, if there were obvious solutions to the hardest—and most interesting—problems we face in the world, they would already have been found. Our job in the U.S. government—I served in the State Department as an assistant secretary focused on human rights—was not to make excuses in such situations, but to use whatever inherently limited tools we had to try to make things better, and to avoid making them worse.
North Korea tests this proposition like nothing else. Since its latest provocative missile test, thoughtful observers have pointed out that neither sanctions nor diplomacy are likely to dissuade Kim Jong Un from deploying nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, that we cannot depend on China to stop him for us, but that the alternative of a military strike on North Korea could cause a war that would lay waste to our ally South Korea. When it comes to North Korea, the phrase “there are no good options” has become a mantra.
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WNU Editor: I concur with this commentary. Having access to information on the outside world helped to bring about change in the Soviet Union and China .... it will also help in changing North Korea. The question that remains unanswered is .... how long and what will happen when that day finally comes.
10 comments:
This would take too long. .it was an option ten years ago and should have been pursued back then.
Now the choices are limited and realistically we'll be looking at war later this year, unless north Korea stops. If they don't, the US will resort to military actions and if that happens and it cannot be restricted to launch sites only (which is likely, thanks to the Chinese supplying mobile launch platforms to north Korea, which all but ensure the necessity of US boots on the ground), it's war.
So yeah. .there will be war..thanks, China!
Correct A, this has 6 to 12 months to solve via diplomacy, thete is not a 10 or 20 year window.
Going to respectfully disagree. If we absolutely flooded them, dropped smart phones, threw up low orbit satellite internet like Elon Musk wants to do, dumped USB drives by the tens of thousands, we could effect change almost overnight. One day the people go to work like mindless slaves, and the next day they know it's all an artificial construct. The right kind of information can completely change a person overnight. As an example, imagine you are all snuggled up to your wife when you find out she has been having a 10 year affair, tomorrow is going to be a dramatically different day than today.
Ropestuff,
After a comment like that I do not know what to say.
:)
Just saying that information can literally change a persons perspective immediately. Using an affair as an example illustrates that. Or like finding out Bill Cosby raped women, Clinton and Lewinsky, Tiger Woods and his indescretions... one day these people are role models to a lot of people and the next day they are pariahs. I wonder how many NorKs know how many people are brutally tortured in NorK prison camps, things like that. I just don't see a decade long transformation of viewpoints, I think it could happen very very fast. And as for the cost, imagine we spent 100 million dumping smart phones on them and such, rebuilding S Korea after an artillery and nuclear attack would take a lot more than 100 million.
Ropestuff,
It was in the 1980s and Rupert Murdock was in Moscow at the invitation of President Gorbachev. I recall at the time that Gorbachev told Murdock that it was because of people like him that the Soviet Union had to reform because they could no longer keep out the information that was coming in from the West. Everyone in the East wanted to be like the West.
I can say the same about China. It was 1988 and I was based in Fujian province .... and across the strait is Taiwan. Everyday the population would go out and walk outside. Everyday with the exception of Wednesday at 6:00 PM (and it lasted for one hour). The rason .... everyone was in their homes watching the program Dallas with JR Ewing being beamed to them from a Taiwan TV station. The impact that program had on China can never be minimised, because in everyone's mind .... American and JR Ewing were one and the same. :)
WNU,
When I lived in Germany "Gunsmoke" (dubbed in German) was the program everyone watched on ZDF I think. You can't imagine how disconcerting and funny it was to see Festus Hagen speaking german.
Gunsmoke in German.
JR Ewing in China.
What's next?
:)
The seeds of the China change were sown with the Nixon visit.
The need for change were apparent when the Gang of 4 were defeated.
Change was well along the way by 1988.
I can think of a lot of ways we could pull this off. E-readers preloaded with books would be another low cost option without the complexity of encrypting smart phones and providing networks. Thumb drives with TV shows like Dallas as you pointed out, haha. But also TV shows like Cops, where they can see what happens in a country with a more civilized legal system. They can watch some American crackhead spitting on cops and being belligerent and see how professional police officers handle people like that without shooting them on the spot (maybe not show them the videos where cops actually do shoot people). Or shows like Orange is the New Black where prisoners get to gripe and be somewhat individualistic without being summarily executed or tortured for it. And also extensive doccumentaries on human rights violations in N Korea followed with some commentary from normal Americans on how horrible we think it is. They can see that we don't actually think the North Korean people are horrible, but that their gross mistreatment is horrible. We can teach them about organizations like Save the Children and Amnesty International and demonstrate that we actually want them to have rights and that we actually fight for people around the world to have rights. We can show them peacefull protests and let them see how police in civilized countries handle dissent without resorting to violence (or even the fact that dissent is allowed in democratic countries). I'm liking this idea. This is the first possible N Korea solution (component of a solution) I can really get behind. Thanks for posting this article MR. WNU.
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