> Pyongyang was making its people miserable before there were sanctions.
Whether or not we approve of Pyongyang is completely irrelevant to every point I've made. The questions are (a) whether the sanctions have had a material negative effect on the North Korean people, and (b) what they have accomplished. The answers are "yes" and "nothing of any use", neither of which is controversial. And our fixation with North Korea and the evil we wrought there obviously doesn't begin with sanctions but with millions of tons of bombs, tens of thousands of tons of napalm on arable land, or the destruction of the People's Republic of Korea (not the DPRK), a functioning government that existed in both the North and South before the US invaded (literally reinstating colonial Japanese governors as officials).
> America isn’t at the centre of the universe—we didn’t cause every geopolitical ripple that ever was.
The US was directly involved in the division of Korea even before all that. Frankly, your entire comment has been not only extremely handwave-y but deeply dishonest.
Ergh, something did get lost in a rewrite of my comment between tons of bombs and pounds of bombs: it's "only" over half a million tons of bombs. Many hundreds of millions of pounds, "only" over 650,000 tons. The range given for napalm was accurate; it's over 30,000 tons.
Whether or not we approve of Pyongyang is completely irrelevant to every point I've made. The questions are (a) whether the sanctions have had a material negative effect on the North Korean people, and (b) what they have accomplished. The answers are "yes" and "nothing of any use", neither of which is controversial. And our fixation with North Korea and the evil we wrought there obviously doesn't begin with sanctions but with millions of tons of bombs, tens of thousands of tons of napalm on arable land, or the destruction of the People's Republic of Korea (not the DPRK), a functioning government that existed in both the North and South before the US invaded (literally reinstating colonial Japanese governors as officials).
> America isn’t at the centre of the universe—we didn’t cause every geopolitical ripple that ever was.
The US was directly involved in the division of Korea even before all that. Frankly, your entire comment has been not only extremely handwave-y but deeply dishonest.