How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner

Why is it interesting observation?

When one invades the country, they of course won't feel safety (like in Iraq), but when they dont invade country, of course it feels safe, because no one is bombing and shooting locals

I remember one Polish diplomat recalling that his boss told him "I am sending you to the safest outpost in the world" when offering him embassy in North Korea.

The sentiment about NK echoes my sentiment about my visits to China in recent years.

I am not surprised that NK will be perceived as safer and more isolated than Iraq.

FWIW, this is no longer true for North Korea: a few years back they removed all references to reunification from the constitution and designated South Korea as an enemy state. They even refer to it by its South Korean name now (Hanguk/Daehanminguk), instead of the previous Namchoson.

That does sound a bit agressive. To be clear, South Korea doesn't so much 'claim the entirety of the Korean Peninsula' as much as it aims to unify the entire peninsula into a single country through peaceful means (at least, since the military government left power in the late '80s).

This article is also from 2021 and things have changed a bit in the North. North Korea changed their constitution a couple of years ago and removed any mention of unification with the South, and defined their territory as basically the existing North/South split (aka 38th parallel). South Korea has been redefined from 'partner in national unity' to 'enemy to be destroyed, by nuclear weapons if need be'.

There's a lot of pretty interesting analysis of North Korea at the 38 North blog (https://www.38north.org/), among other good sources.

I was fascinated to learn while visiting they consider themselves ‘at war’ and generations from a unified time still strongly believe in the cause.

In tech specifically this leads to some surprising results such as transit planning being very ineffective or broken in google maps due to onshore data storage requirements. Subway alignments are regarded as sensitive info

Can't open the article, so maybe it was already mentioned. But not only does South Korea claim the entire Peninsula, they even consider North Koreans as South Korean citizens.

My corp firewall blocks archive dot ph

https://web.archive.org/web/20250409223505/https://mydiploma...

Sounds more like what he had to survive was the sheer boredom.

Because they would shell Seoul and have nukes [0] and a successful rocket program to deliver them [1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...

[1] https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/dprk/ 10,000 km gets you to the west coast and significant parts of the western US, 13000 covers the whole of the US. NK has the Hwasong-15 with a nominal range of 15000 km...

I don't know who "we" is, but assassinating or kidnapping foreigners is illegal.

Also, it didn't work. Not in Iran and not even in Venezuela.

American hegemony is over, better get used to no longer being the world's sheriff.

North Korea is geopolitically useful as a buffer state between the United States' sphere of influence in South Korea, and China. China has defended it pretty determinedly, historically.

IIRC, one of the highest profile North Korean defectors said that Jimmy Carter's interference in Bill Clinton's Korea strategy basically gave North Korea another decade to build an atom bomb. After that regime got the bomb, they became un-invadeable.

"Passcode to the Third Floor" describes this instance and other missed opportunities to undermine the North Korean regime.

The less snarky answer is that our current system does not have a functioning global government. There is no real “we”. Influencing how other countries operate can only be done by force or diplomacy, and because North Korea has nuclear weapons, force is basically off the table, and they’re not interested in diplomacy.

Venezuela was much more like a coup than a military action. The military didn't meaningfully resist, anti-air weaponry did not fire - and the US knew it wasn't going to fire because otherwise there would've been choppers getting fragged left and right. And then we kind of waved off that Nobel Prize winner lady who wanted war, to say nothing of the Guido guy, let Maduro's VP take over, and she instantly become a US puppet but otherwise kept Maduroing along as usual. Interestingly her father was killed by the Venezuelan intelligence services, which was created by Chavez, and Maduro was Chavez's hand-picked successor. She sounds kind of like a Gorbachev, whose formative years were spent under the joys of Stalin. Consequences of bad actions can, and often do, manifest only decades later.

Anyhow, point being - you're not going to get anything like that in most countries. Iran should make that clear enough. North Korea is orders of magnitude stronger than Iran, and Iran is already basically unbeatable simply because they were prepared for a decapitation strike which is pretty much our only card - Americans would never tolerate a real ground war which would entail hundreds of thousands dying. And this is all just ignoring the fact that North Korea also has nuclear weapons.

NK is so heavily militarised and culturally isolated that an extraordinary rendition is likely to backfire even more so than they typically do.

Depending on who "we" are, "we" are the reason it exists and are contributing to its stability, never giving a shit about people or any suffering.

Nuclear ballistic ammo… they are insane enough that there non-zero probability they could use them against anybody.

Also comrades from other countries would probably support them.

It’s too close to China & Russia, whereas Venezuela had nobody in the vicinity that could help respond.

North Korean has won, once they had nukes and ICBMs they became untouchable.

The general concerns are:

- An enormous amount of artillery pointed at South Korea. South Korea would likely suffer the worst outcome in any intervention into North Korea.

- A nuclear-armed power who is truly ideological. Unlike Maduro, merely killing the leader is unlikely to dissuade the North Koreans. (a lesson the Trump admin is currently learning in Iran)

None of my friends in a Venezuela have noticed any actual improvements after Maduro. The current president was appointed by Maduro and was VP for 6 (?) years. I know some political prisoners are released, but if you are looking at suffering on country-level I don't think anything has changed.

Uhh, because Seoul is a big city and right next door? Is this not abundantly obvious? Also, China has influence here which is a secondary reason

Define "we"

Nukes.

Nukes. And honestly man the last time the US intervened in NK we didn't leave a building taller than 2 stories standing and killed 25% of their population. I'm absolutely certain an intervention from us would be worse for NK citizens than their current government.

B/c they have nukes

HN effect

Based on the topic, this could be intentional.

Why? Because the poor are starving? North Korea has ultra-wealthy ... it works a bit differently but there is massive inequality, and there is extreme wealth.

The HN and Reddit hug of death is very real. Getting traction on either can direct an overwhelming firehose of traffic at sites that were never designed to scale up because they're minor personal blogs or projects.