[jmyeet]

North Korea has roughly the equal third largest standing army in the world. North Korea has nuclear weapons. What exactly have we prevented?

My point is that economic sanctions never work against enemies. They only work against allies. Apartheid South Africa is the example that springs to mind.

Take the economic sanctions against Russia after it's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. What have they done exactly? Russia is now basically a war economy. It still has energy exports because there's always a market for that.

[elhudy]

I don’t get why you’re trying to characterize NKs military as strong when it is objectively not so. The goal for stability in the region is for SK to have a stronger military. If we want to look at whether sancions have progressed that goal, then we would need to evaluate the relative strength of the two since the time sanctions went into place. How large of a standing army they have is not your kpi

[maxglute]

TBH NK special case in that they make sanctions bite extra hard out of (Juche) policy. They're in prime geography to evade/smuggle all they want. IMO pretty good illustration on the maximum limits of US sanctions - i.e. countries with enough industrial base with max sanctions and tying their own hands can still concentrate enough resources to nuclearize and build icbms. Reality is NK nuclearization threatens US regional security architecture and likely reached stretch goal of penetrating CONUS GMD, i.e. NK basically the only shit tier country that can on paper nuke US.

Conventionally, now that we're in era of cheap drone warfare, harder to extrapolate NK/SK force disparity anymore. Risks no longer limited to artillery a few dozen km south of DMZ. NK building loitering munitions that can cover entirity of SK - SK has no longer have even modest strategic depth to hide high end hardware unlike few years ago. Ditto with Iran being able to credibly hit Israel. But that's more factor of tech proliferation.