Instead of a trillion dollars in war costs and thousands to millions dead, how about giving NK leadership (not the government, the actual people) $500 billion to step-aside/reunite-with-SK/be-not-crazy?
Preliminary musing on side effects:
Downsides: Incentive for future crazy leaders.
Upside: People don't die.
How do you bypass the government?
+Sordatos Cáceres I mean give to the people in government for their own personal use. In other words, bribe them out of power as opposed to giving them money to spend on official government expenses like welfare for their people or whatever.
And if they use a chunk of that $500 billion to build up their arsenal?
Not interested in war either but I doubt a bribe would solve the problem. Small actors have a strong incentive to act crazy.
Yes, I would have strings attached, like…they have to leave the country, etc.
Sounds great, but I'm not sure that's sufficient motivation. They'd be surrendering an army of personal security services, a potential lifetime of bribes, and an entire machine of propaganda/culture designed to keep them in power and personally enrich them. Who ensures that they keep the money they receive? Then you also have to deal with the ensuing power vacuum and making sure no one follows in their footsteps. I'm not sure how you would guarantee that short of occupation. China and Russia wouldn't like that very much, unless they had a stake in the new government… and I'm not sure the U.S. would find that acceptable either.
I'm not presenting a foolproof plan here, there's a multitude of potential issues…a problem this plan of mine shares with military options. (See the quagmire of Afghanistan). As of yet, I'm not convinced that my hypothetical is in any way worse than military options.
I'm not sure it's sufficient motivation either. It likely depends on the foibles of the individuals involved.
Take Afghanistan/Iraq. Huge amount of problems much like you've mentioned. The upside of my plan vs the plan actually implemented by the USA is that my plan doesn't leave thousands dead as an intentional part of the plan.
I'm always in favor of less dead people.
However, complex problems like NK, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc are often systemic, which means the solution is systemic as well. Economic, political, cultural, and militarized. A less robust plan is unstable and likely to fail, sometimes catastrophically. Hence my wariness about engaging in state craftsmanship. (Somehow I doubt Trump has the same perspective…)
Well, yes, I wouldn't advocate for throwing money at the problem and then walking away to never think of it again.
I'm not sure "robustness" is the right level of abstraction to think about this hypothetical. Both military action and bribery can be part of a robust plan or a non-robust plan.
Because giving money to a "government/dictatorship" without some form of contract would mean that Haliburton, and the like, won't get a slice of that cake. Thus the local government wouldn't get any regional industrial benefits, also known as offsets. This means that the bulk of the money wouldn't come back to the local government.
That's why they often don't just dole out cash.
+Greg Linton Sounds like a feature to me!
Have you read Issac Asimov's Foundation series? There is a similar concept there I am fond of. Involves providing consumer good to a population who no longer have access to such things. When it comes to war, middle class rebel because they don't want to go back to austerity.
Sure, it's fiction, but don't underestimate the power of economics.
Also worth considering from the NK pov. The US bombed them back to the stone age, and they have been trading (internally, politically) on that ever since. Break that mindset and you essentially change the country. Providing consumer goods to the people (no monopoly, no single point of corruption) labelled "From the USA. We're sorry. We aren't the same people"…