Quote Originally Posted by flagg View Post
As I understand it(rightly or wrongly), the Catholic Church under Polish Pope John Paul II had a partnership or at least closely aligned interests with Reagan Administration led NATO during the 80's with Poland/Solidarity being one of the key points of focus.

As I understand it, there are private groups in South Korea that may be acting unilaterally with efforts of quite questionable effectiveness like balloon flights laden with western media.

On the surface it seems similar, but I suspect a key difference is that private non kinetic efforts against the Warsaw Pact were aligned(or not contrary to) with government policy, while private efforts against North Korea may be an embarrassing disconnect with South Korean/allied strategic and diplomatic policy.

As indicated here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...drives/283106/

Is that a crucial and key difference?

Could the behaviour of some key partners/allies(US, Japan perhaps) be akin to perpetually refinancing the "North Korean mortgage" and pushing out the "balloon payments" when NK falls?
That was an informative article in The Atlantic, thanks for sharing the link. I'm hypothesizing of course, but I do think private groups so far are less effective than governments in waging information shaping. However, combined efforts working towards similar goals can be quite powerful. I'm not sure the private groups are ineffective though, they certainly prompted KJU regime to respond.

As for

If non violent civil resistance is not a likely outcome.

Would North Korea's increasing permeability to information/truth make it far more likely to transition to something akin to late term Saddam Era Iraq?

Resilient Totalitarianism with Truth accessibility?

Heavily sanctioned with degrading quality of life and standard of living for the masses, but propped up by nuclear blackmail and oil for food corruption respectively?

Would North Korea be a prime candidate for a realpolitik negotiated transition of power and immunity from prosecution for core leadership?

Or would a possibly likely outcome for potential success for North Korea look more like a planned and coordinated rise of a North Korean Deng Xioaping?

If NK does try to copy Deng, could it have missed the boat waiting so long changing course and now sailing INTO the winds of unskilled labour being increasingly and globally automated combined with fast increasing global recession risk?
Who knows? I think this quote from for SEC Gates is relevant (it is also a topic that Kissinger discussed in his book "World Order"):

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/T...id=O9-ltc5cBTM

"The administration got caught up in the Arab Spring. They misread it pretty badly. There were no institutions to support the kind of reform efforts that the street demonstrators were calling for in the overthrow of these authoritarian governments." Worse, it sent a message to friendly regimes facing potential instability: "If you have demonstrations in your capital, the U.S. will throw you under the bus. So it disconcerted the Saudis and all our Arab allies."
The highlights are mine. I think we still have this End of History view that democracy and free markets will magically emerge if dictators are suddenly removed. A view that hundreds of years of history disputes. If KJU is removed through force of a peaceful revolution, then what? What type of follow on government is the realm of the possible? What would China allow? What would the ROKs try to impose? Maybe a year or a little longer, the magazine, The American Interest, published an article or opinion piece that argued instead of trying to impose democracy, we should take a longer term view and approach and set the conditions for democracy. What does that entail? Is that even possible in North Korea?