North Korea there will be blood?

There are about a hundred other nations with slightly smaller fangs. Who's next?

You are totally right. After reading your post, I see that yes, it IS too late to beat these guys. I say we ust keep economically sanctioning them, but if they so much as throw an errant missle and kill either American troops or S,Korean civilians, we cruise missle their military capacity back to the stone age!We cant very well afford to allow them to build nukes or they will have us where they want us. China, meanwhile, lets it happen and waits for the US to fall.

What are we supposed to do, then? It looks as if though this ragtag bunch of brainwashed Asians is gonna hurt us one way or another.We cant afford to be propping up any more dictators either. Look where that has gotten us......

Accept the things you cannot change. Have the courage to change the things you can and the wisdom to know the difference.There will always be dictators with ragtag brainwashed followers. Pulling out your hair and fretting that we should be DOING something won't change that.Choose your battles, don't make the cure worse than the disease... and other assorted cliches.

IMHO, absolutely. The Chinese economy is joined at the hip with the US economy. The last thing they want is bad relations with the US. All we need to do is figure out a way for China to play a leadership role, and allow them to save face in the process.As for Russia, who cares. Just personal speculation again . . . I strongly suspect that Russia would rather leave East Asia to China and focus on other areas of the globe. I think it would require NATO and UN support which would be easier to get this time around given the real threat and N. Korea's stance on weapons inspections. The goal of the fighting is different than the war itself. We could just walk away and would not be under immediate threat from an army run by a nation state. What we are attempting to do now is police a nation so that a stable democracy can be formed. Whether this is a good idea or not is a totally different topic, but that is what we are doing.

Can the US afford to occupy North Korea for a decade or so to create a new government and should we?

Probably not. I suspect any US action will be along the lines of "bomb everything even remotely resembling a military target" followed by "let the south and china handle the refugee fallout and resultant nation building"

We could definitely afford to do it, but it might cost more than US citizens are willing to pay. That's the sticking point.Hopefully the US will not have to bear the brunt of policing N. Korea if it comes to that. I think there are other countries in the region that would want to take a leadership role. If China does take the lead, would they allow for the development of a democratic government? That is an interesting question on its own.

So should the US even care about North Korea?Should we care whether or not North Korea attacks South Korea, uses nuclear weapons against South Korea, has a totalitarian government that starves it's people?Are the our problems?If the US simply turns aside would it matter at all to the US?

That is certainly a good question. No one is asking about Estonia's position on N. Korea, or asking if Hungary is going to send in troops.Imagine the "oh shit" expression on the faces of world leaders if the US marched into the UN and said, "we really don't give a flying fuck what N. Korea does to other countries in Asia. It's not our problem anymore, you guys deal with it." Is it really in the interest of the US to be the world police? The US can certainly influence world politics to its favor, but at what price? Is there an advantage to a US isolationist policy? Would we ever elect a president who campaigned on an isolationist platform?

The issue is not just intervene or become isolationist, that just a false dichotomy. The US should still intervene when it is in our national interest but should the US assume the mantle of the worlds guardian?North Korea is not a real threat to the US. Even a North Korea with a few nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles is not a really major threat to the US.So in the case of North Korea in this era should the US say to Korea, Japan, Russia, China, "Sorry gang, yes, North Korea is a loose cannon and a despotic regime that is starving it's population and brainwashing them. We can certainly see how they pose a real problem for you guys but it's not my problem."

I am sure that there is more than one doctoral thesis on that topic. It surely deserves its own thread. In general, I don't think the US should take on the mantle of world guardian. It should be more of a group effort. The US already spends more money on their military than the next 20 countries combined, or some insane statistic like that. We are STILL occupying Germany 70 years after WWII, and still have bases in Okinawa.More importantly, we still have a lot of troops stationed in S. Korea, and they have been there since the 1950's. That is what pulls us into this conflict.

I think we should care about the North Koreans who are being victims of gross human rights violations. Don't you?

So we could just bring those troop home.Then that removes one possible threat.

The US should be dropping via parachutes so much food & medicine everywhere, more than the Regime can steal away. They should have been doing this since 1953.They blew a big chance to be world famous. So sad.