No Stupid Questions

Nobody wants to do that. North Korea is a shithole-class country that hates SK, is propped up by China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, who basically use them as slave labor and cannon fodder for their illegal war in Ukraine.

While NATO could easily steamroll NK, SK is right there and would get heavily damaged in a war. And then SK would probably have to take care of a ton of starving, brainwashed, uneducated people and a bombed flat country. Nobody wants to fix them, and superpowers like China are actively working against peaceful initiatives like reunification.

It's an injustice for the world, but there's much bigger fish to fry on the world stage right now. Existential, extinction-class threats like climate change and nuclear war. Democracies fighting tooth and nail against totalitarianism, like Ukraine. And western countries in various fights against the predictable but extremely annoying rise in fascism.

Why should we, as the collective west, spend soldiers lifes and money on "liberating" a population that hates us? Oh, and please mind: "Liberating" a country normally also includes killing a shitton of civilians in this process.

Nukes baby!

"Step in?" Well, because the world isn't run by a mom and dad who step in and make governments do the right things.

What exactly are you suggesting we do about it? They’ve got enough conventional artillery aimed at Seoul to cause millions of casualties the moment it even looks like we’re about to intervene.

Can't do anything as long as China wants the situation to stay like this.

The short answer is that they have nukes.

• China would be really pissed off about that.

• The major problem is what do you do with the massive humanitarian crises you after you remove the regime?You will have to care for millions of people who have had everything given to them.

• Tthis is really messed up, what is the economic interest in doing something about it?

You can't treat governments like they're people. The same detachment from the human spirit applies as it does to any sufficiently large corporation, multinational, politburo, royal court, whatever.

Even if your specific nation holds your specific code of ethics and standards, there can be severe consequences to holding all other nations to the same standard.

Unless you're a superpower, in which case you're the oppressor, simply by engaging in diplomacy.

Given all of this, what you're asking for is for one nation to have perfect foreign policy that would compel change in North Korea. Then, all other nations would need to adopt and extend the same policy, but independently and without external pressure.

No one wants the ugliness of a war over NK, but everyone wants their natural resources, estimated to be one of the largest deposit of minerals in the world.

iirc one of the issues is that even if things go perfectly on a military front no one is quite sure how to handle and de-program/rehabilitate 25.5 million people a large quantity of which likely lack any skills that would be useful in western economies.