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Comment by colinmhayes | Hacker News Reader

> then the US should look to other tools of statecraft to combat problematic states like North Korea.

What do you suggest? North Korea is effectively a rogue state, only having relations with China and sort of Iran. What other statecraft tools do you think the US has its disposal?

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Massively increase counter-espionage budgets, to shadow NK agents outside of the country, and counter their malign activity. It may be costly, but the cost of creating a global surveillance state, with AML checks encumbering billions of interactions each day, is bound to be greater. This is just a small fraction of the costs involved:

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/insights-resources/research/2019...

The impact on the developing world is profound:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...

I'm not sure if the issue is that north korea has particularly good intelligence. It's more so that they have nuclear weapons and aren't afraid to tell us how they'd use them. Maybe leaders who are able to leave would be annoyed, but I'm pretty sure they are already being annoyed, and I'm no sure if that's enough to convince them to change their behavior.

By agents, I was also including economic agents, that raise hard currency for the government outside of the country. A discriminating approach would aid NK refugees, while blocking the actions of agents of the NKean state. That could blunt some of the humanitarian damage from blocking inflows of hard currency from the latter into the country, since the former still maintain ties to family in the country, and could be a source of aid to them.

Other ways to counter the threat posed by the North Korean state include aiding and encouraging South Korea and Japan in building up their armed forces, as a deterrent to any North Korean attack, and expanding deployments of missile defense systems while increasing funding for the development of more advanced missile defense systems.

Yet another approach could be to apply pressure on North Korea's allies, like Iran and China, to reduce military cooperation with the state, as long as it remains outside of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

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