How do they expect provoking NK to end?

[MGKrebs]

83. Ah, good. This is exactly the discussion I was looking for.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet Nam, Libya, Lebanon- in none of those places has the country been rebuilt "with UN help and food". In fact, all except Viet Nam are still unstable sources of danger and destruction after we left. Even the Soviet Union, who we "defeated" in some sense of the word,has not been a peaceful and productive transition to being friendly.

My point is- it's not good enough to go in there (NK), bomb them into submission, and then say "OK now it's someone else's problem to fix it up". What happens is a vacuum that is often filled by unsociable types. At the very least we would be ceding that territory to China.

We would have to be prepared to follow through with a long term "Marshall Plan" type thing, and I don't know what that would look like. If people anticipated that level of involvement would they still want to bomb them?