Ruler, I just want to say before you delve into this, that yes, the US regime has committed atrocities and numerous horrible thigns, and yes I'd consider them a threat to the world, but remember, there isn't always a good side. The North Korean regime is terrible. However, I personally am against wat because of the innocent lives that will be lost, and because I'm weary of the US's intentions.

The conclusion is no one is willing to pay with the lives of potentially 10+ million people dead just to have Kim removed. 

Really is NK any worse than Saudi Arabia? China? Israel also commits human rights abuses. 

They're just more broke, which causes their people to suffer. 

If you want to be upset that they have nuclear weapons in the first place, blame George W. Bush. But they've had them now for 11+ years.

Are you willing to go fight in a land war in a radiated Korea? I doubt it.

So you believe that an assault against NK will result in a 100% fatality rate for North Korean? Good to know you don't actually have a handle on war.

Is that what you think I was getting at? We need to fix our current allies, but get more broken ones. And before you try and soon that into a statement about money: broken morally, not financially broke.

Why are you turning this into a left vs right argument? Knock that shit off, no one will take you seriously if you keep trying to drag every discussion into DemVSRep territory. And for the record, I don't care that they have nuclear weapons. I care that they keep threatening to throw them at America and American allies.

Yeah and I don't think North Korea really gives a crap what you "feel" or about being liked. Their primary objective is to ensure the survival of their regime. The only difference is they're pretty fucking good at playing this game as opposed to some other "rogue states". 

At this point the US already has many allies with human rights issues and their no.1 trade partner is a so-called "communist" country in China. I guess what would really be the difference in normalizing relations with North Korea?

Give them economic incentives, in return they agree not to fire shit over Japan, tone down the rhetoric, and improve the living conditions of their citizens. IMO that's the only logical play here. 

I agree with you that Bush's stance simultaneously told the DPRK that playing nice was not going to be as lucrative as previously expected, while aggressively pursuing nuclear capability might be a useful tool to increase their perceived and actual military defensibility now that the USA was actively invading places that it got super pissed off at. 

However, I disagree with your claim that giving economic concessions will alleviate the situation.  Any aid we give will, I believe, go straight to their military and/or party loyalists with very little trickle down effect. 

I doubt that they will agree to stop firing missiles over other countries, because—let's be honest here—if you're in North Korea and you want to test a long range missile, what else are you going to do?  This is both a source of legitimate concern for the DPRK's neighbors and a legitimate desire on the part of the DPRK. 

My personal feeling about the proposition that North Korea's nuclear capability is improving too much and/or too quickly and we have to act now to stop it is this:  as far as stopping them from being capable of nuking U.S. assets, it's already too late.  Even if their missiles couldn't get to the west coast, or even if they could but we could shoot them down, they can certainly nuke what we have in South Korea and Japan.  But who's to say that their missile capabilities will get better faster than our anti-missile capabilities?  I don't think there's such a certainty that a later conflict will be much worse than one today that we should trigger a nuclear war now when we might avoid one by waiting. 

The DPRK might fold in the face of a joint China-USA conventional weapons operation without resorting to nukes.  I don't know.  But doing anything of the kind without China's firm assent would be an invitation to World War III.  China wouldn't want to, but if NK hit them in its death throes in the wake of unilateral U.S. strikes I don't think anyone knows what would happen. 

It would be SOUTH Korea that would likely lose the most life, we know North Korea has conventional missles aimed at Seoul, Seoul is the fucking size of New York City population wise. They can hit that with ease, Seoul is a 25 minute drive from North Korea's border, missles would be able to reach the city within 2-3 minutes. 

You are talking about the deaths of millions of people in minutes. Even Bannon, who I don't like, basically said this too before being dumped from Trump's cabinet. 

The US military knows all this. There are no good military options here. Also, not a chance that China just lets the US occupy their border with a US military force. 

If it's "already too late" ... then what's the point here? They have nuclear weapons. They've had them for 11 years now. Of course they were going to get better with them over time. 

IMO economic incentives can be given with preconditions that they lose some of those incentives if they don' comply they lose money. 

Any type of "lets just let them bomb Japan and South Korea" is a non-starter. Up to 50,000 Americans could be killed that's freaking seventeen 9/11s, even if you can't for whatever reason feel any compassion for other citizens.  

Also China is no hurry to help the US here, really. Why? So they can have a US puppet state armed to the teeth on their border? Gee. I think their feeling on that is "thanks, but no thanks". 

The only way the Chinese would agree to help in a serious way is if they get to keep North Korea and make it a Chinese state, and fat chance the US military signs off on that. 

This stuff isn't so black/white ... Game of Thrones isn't black/white, real geopolitics certainly is not. 

"Pre-emptive" is the operative term in this thread. With that in mind, how would bombing NK in a way that would rid us of Kim Dong Un cause a collapse in the global economy?

"Collapse" might be too strong a word, but don't you think that the US attacking North Korea would incite North Korea to attack South Korea and probably Japan?  Considering that Seoul is literally within artillery range of North Korea, do you think that a pre-emptive strike would be so completely successful that no counter-attack could possibly take place?