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[Flying Dice]

We could always send lawyers, guns, and money.

[Truean]

We could always send lawyers, guns, and money booze, drugs, and Ayn Rand, the trifecta.

FTFY

[Flying Dice]

We could always send lawyers, guns, and money booze, drugs, and Ayn Rand, the trifecta.

FTFY

I was making a song reference/joke about Kim Jong Un. D:

[Loud Whispers]

So what we need to do is build a ridiculously fast, extremely durable plane designed specifically to drop food aid into North Korea?

Or just use any of the bombers already in existence. Not that that would help much, NK wouldn't take kindly to bombers in their airspace.

[Eric Blank]

Technically, stealth bombers are an option for such an exercise.

[mainiac]

I think you guys are all overlooking the part of this plan where you intentionally piss of the crazy man who can take tens of thousands of civilians down with him.

[Pnx]

There's also the issue of what you do about the thousands of people living and dying in the Gulag/Auschwitz  style political prison camps.

[Flying Dice]

There are too many factors involved for us to come up with the best course of action, at least without access to more complete information. Do the lives lost in a direct military intervention and the fallout thereof exceed the lives lost in however long it will take for NK to topple from internal pressures? Who would actually be willing to start a war with NK for the express purpose of removing the government? The US is still bogged down in two grinding, long-haul wars and likely couldn't muster public support. The UN? Heh, no. And what about the Chinese? They'd certainly object vehemently, unless they were the ones doing it. Actually, China seems like the most likely candidate for a nation that would be willing to do it, and they might actually manage it with a relatively limited conflict. The issue, of course, is whether the political capital and increased regional stability would make it worthwhile for them.

Because let's be frank, aid drops do absolutely fuck-all to help the people of a nation with a government with this amount of control. In short, there aren't any "good" options, and the closest we have is probably something along the lines of "this knot is too complex for me to untie, I'll leave the work to time".

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I find that pretty doubtful. Both sides of the DMZ would shoot you down if you tried that.

[alway]

"this knot is too complex for me to untie, I'll leave the work to spy agencies".

FTFY.

Neither China nor anyone else will risk a direct confrontation. What will likely happen is covert ops en masse. The CIA could get involved, but, quite frankly, I see China as having a bigger finger in this pot. The US stands to gain... basically an angry China, a slightly more happy SK, and a huge stinking pile of management if they were to subterfuge their way into becoming the NK government. And the US stands to lose.... not all that much directly.
China stands to gain a friendly puppet government to buffer themselves from Westernized nations like SK and Japan if they were to succeed in subterfuge. And without subterfuge, they stand to lose the region's stability, their superpower status due to a regional arms race, an unstable country on their borders who may resort to threatening China itself with nuclear weapons, and so on.

China has more to gain from subterfuge and more to lose from abstaining from it. I strongly suspect if NK keeps up as it has been, China will turn it into a puppet state in their own best interests.

[Flying Dice]

That does seem like one of the more likely possibilities. Frankly, it's also one of the least destructive solutions, if they can pull it off cleanly.

[Max White]

China has Kim Jong Nam, right?
I may never know a finer puppet...

[Sirus]

That does seem like one of the more likely possibilities. Frankly, it's also one of the least destructive solutions, if they can pull it off cleanly.

In the words of the Spartans:
"If".

[Flying Dice]

That does seem like one of the more likely possibilities. Frankly, it's also one of the least destructive solutions, if they can pull it off cleanly.

In the words of the Spartans:
"If".

It's not as if there isn't historical precedent. Look at all those CIA shenanigans in Latin America during the Cold War and tell me that China couldn't pull off something similar with less bloodshed. If they had plants in place ready to grab the reins all it would take would be a few quiet assassinations, and I don't believe for a moment that NK propaganda would convince their people to fight for the right to starve under the rule of the NK government rather than whatever they'd get under a Chinese puppet state.

It's more likely than Kim Jong Un spontaneously deciding to dismantle his dictatorship or a UN-lead intervention/invasion that goes off without a hitch, anyhow.

[Sirus]

What, you mean like Cuba? Those kind of shenanigans?

I'm not saying China can't pull it off, I'm just saying that the Great Leader seems to have a pretty powerful cult around him and it'll probably be a tough nut to crack.