How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner

When serving in Iraq or Iran, my biggest fear in those places was always the threat of physical harm, be it ambushes on our person or vehicles, being kidnapped, rocket or mortar attacks on our embassy or accommodation. There were close shaves and the threat and the fear never left you in all of these places. But as far as life in North Korea was concerned, there were none of these fears. Serving in North Korea gave you this strange feeling of being cut off, isolated and very insular and perversely at the same time “safe.”

tuwtuwtuwtuw2• 14 days ago

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

throwaw122• 14 days ago

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

pizza234• 14 days ago

NK is politically aligned with the red countries, and positioned against US. Especially after the Otto Warmbier accident, some believe that Americans/Westerners in NK are in constant danger (my opinion: O.W. did something stupid while drunk; the accusations were obviously fabricated but the incident was not unprovoked), so to those, it may seem surprising that somebody can feel safe there.

jacekm• 14 days ago

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.

zatkin• 14 days ago

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

orphereus3• 14 days ago

Playing golf in North Korea sounds crazy.

spwa4• 14 days ago

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.

asdf88990• 14 days ago

So kind of like USA but different?

orphereus3• 14 days ago

Because North Korea is such a parody of a country that adding a golf course to it sounds completely surreal to me.

thisislife24• 14 days ago

Russians and Chinese have a lot of investment in North Korea - North Korea opens ‘world-class’ tourist resort - https://www.rt.com/news/620717-north-korea-resort-tourism/ ... and they also contract a lot of North Korean to work in their country (ofcourse, it is more akin to the bonded labourer system).

runamuck• 14 days ago

"North Korea’s border with South Korea is a disputed border as both countries claim the entirety of the Korean Peninsula." - I did not know South Korea felt this way!

UnfitFootprint2• 14 days ago

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

sgjohnson• 14 days ago

I was fascinated to learn while visiting they consider themselves ‘at war’

fun fact, Japan and Russia are technically in a state of war too. The World War II hasn't ended. They have never signed a treaty over the Kuril Islands, and they both claim them.

danparsonson• 14 days ago

Indeed the fighting ended in an armistice so the war was never legally declared to be over. Visiting the DMZ between the countries is a surreal experience - part tense stand-off, part theme park.

decimalenough• 14 days ago

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.

looperhacks• 14 days ago

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.

thisislife24• 14 days ago

And yet, they are very wary and afraid of unification due to the impact it may have on their economy. A unified Korea may become a "developing nation" again.

kjs3• 14 days ago

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.

clickety_clack• 14 days ago

South Korea sounds like Ireland. Ireland has a constitutional “firm will” to reunite the island, and people living in Northern Ireland (a part of the UK) can get Irish citizenship.

OkayPhysicist• 14 days ago

Due to this, back when Hong Kong was under U.K control, a person born in North Ireland to a Hong Kong resident could claim 3 birthright citizenships: U.K., Ireland, and China.

Forgeties79• 14 days ago

For another interesting perspective, folks should check out Crossing the Line - https://youtu.be/W3L1JemU8hA?is=3SQszuI5s45z7i2W

It’s about 3 (I think? Been a while since I watched) US soldiers that defected to NK during the Korean War. One dude stayed for decades and defended NK intensely in this doc, going so far as to star in propaganda movies against the US while he was there. Wild stuff

totetsu• 14 days ago

Seems like every other post from this site is [dead]

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

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.

zerr• 14 days ago

Why do we keep tolerating that regime which makes 26 mln people suffer? Why can't we do Operation a la Maduro there?

cedilla• 14 days ago

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.

AnimalMuppet• 14 days ago

It worked to a degree in Venezuela. (Depending on what you think the goal was, of course...)

sixtyj• 14 days ago

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.

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

Their main security comes from the viable threat of nuclear retaliation and the conventional artillery pointed at SK's capital city along with the lack of desire by SK to integrate and modernize NK in a hypothetical post war state.

dikanoflowt• 14 days ago

Define "we"

everdrive• 14 days ago

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)

40four• 14 days ago

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

samlinnfer• 14 days ago

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

Windchaser• 14 days ago

tbf, they already had artillery pointed at 10 million people, enough to commit an atrocity. The nukes were just the frosting on the cake.

myrmidon• 14 days ago

"won" is a very strong word for a country that sits economically somewhere between South Sudan and Congo, with a primary "enemy" that started out similarly and is now easily 20 times richer.

Self-sufficiency and exclusion from global trade can be very expensive for a nation long-term (a cautionary tale, since those ideals are a bit of a siren call nowadays to many Americans, after getting quite wealthy by doing the exact opposite).

dibujaron• 14 days ago

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.

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

You don't even need China. They have the Hwasong-17 and nukes and would very likely use them to retaliate. There's a reason they were quite keen to develop nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them to the US mainland.

Even short of a nuclear response Seoul is in range of conventional artillery from North Korea and is dug in enough you couldn't destroy them all before the were able to do significant damage to Seoul.

[0] https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/hwasong-17/

jasonvorhe• 14 days ago

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

__alexs• 14 days ago

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

sokka_h2otribe• 14 days ago

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

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

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...

hitekker• 14 days ago

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.

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

That was definitely the last time the US got particularly close to a deal with North Korea that would limit it's nuclear ambitions but in a very Trump-like fashion (though to be fair this is very common) Bush came in claiming he could get a better deal and ultimately got basically nothing.

One funny side event to all this was when North Korea accidentally (?) revealed their secret uranium enrichment program when providing records from their Yongbyon reactor. They claimed at the time they didn't have a uranium enrichment program but there were traces of HEU on the records provided along with some aluminum tube samples and that scuppered the talks in 2008.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-21-fg-korea...

thehappypm• 14 days ago

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.

peder• 14 days ago

The less snarky answer is that our current system does not have a functioning global government

What an odd thing to say. Even when there were monolithic governments ruling over certain sphere of influence like the USSR over Eastern Europe, you still had countries break ranks like Yugoslavia and Romania. A single unified government does not mean that individual actors do not know and use their own leverage to advance their own interests.

North Korea is independent for a variety of reasons, and it's not clear that a pro-US North Korea is an all-around win with no downsides for the US. I think both the US and China like having buffer states to avoid flashpoints for war.

tuwtuwtuwtuw2• 14 days ago

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.

SmirkingRevenge2• 14 days ago

B/c they have nukes

orbital-decay• 14 days ago

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.

peppersghost93• 14 days ago

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.

somenameforme• 14 days ago

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.

9999px2• 14 days ago

Nukes.

snovymgodym• 14 days ago

If you think US foreign policy decisions are, or ever have been, made primarily on the basis of preventing the suffering of civilians in other countries then I have an Aerospace & Defense Sector ETF to sell you.

Snark aside, the real answer is that in the past it was infeasible and undesirable due to the geopolitical situation with China and the USSR. Any major operation there would have been a Cuban missile crisis level provocation. After North Korea successfully built nuclear weapons, any sort of regime change games like the US has done in other countries became totally out of the question. There may have been a brief window in the 1990s where it would have been possible, but it still would likely have resulted in mass civilian casualties (look at where Seoul is on a map).

The only "good" realistic scenario for North Korea in the next 20 years is that they gradually reform their system akin to what China did in the late 70s, early 80s.

quickthrowman2• 14 days ago

Two reasons.

Artillery aimed at Seoul: https://atlasinstitute.org/seouls-48-hour-nightmare-from-nor...

Nuclear weapons that can hit Japan (and US bases in Japan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...

Plus, the quiet part that nobody ever says is neither China or South Korea actually wants to reintegrate a thoroughly brainwashed population. It would be the worst refugee crisis ever by at least an order of magnitude.

German reintegration was difficult enough, reintegrating Korea would be much harder

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

That's out of date, they can nominally reach the US mainland now with nuclear payloads. Accuracy and reliability are somewhat questionable but it's a huge gamble.

https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/hwasong-17/

thisislife24• 14 days ago

The South Koreans are opposed to any provocation - any military operation will immediately start a war and the South Koreans know that they will bear the brunt of it. Whether the South Koreans are involved or not, they will still be blamed and targeted as they have a military alliance with the US. Having emerged from an economic crisis, South Koreans are also very wary of a war setting them back again. And, like the previous Korean war, China and Russia will also likely get involved.

HelloUsername• 14 days ago

(2021) Previous discussion in 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40937973

mito88• 14 days ago

- how is life in north korea?

- can't complain!

throwaw122• 14 days ago

Could you go out on your own for a walk?
Surprisingly yes.
Did you get many opportunities to travel within the country?
Surprisingly yes.

And surprisingly title is: "How To Survive 3 Years in NK"

These people are so biased, they show that bias even when they don't have anything bad to say. Poor people in that country might say how to survive, but not a member of diplomatic corpus

phyzome2• 14 days ago

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

phyzome2• 14 days ago

Man, what's going on with this site that makes every phrase "North Korea" into a link about playing golf there? Some kind of self-link-auto-enhancement plugin gone nuts?

9999px2• 14 days ago

DPRK is obviously maligned by U.S. propaganda, but I know several people who've gone and loved it. Famously, the "Boy Boy" YouTube channel guys went and got a haircut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

quickthrowman2• 14 days ago

Why are you sharing North Korean propaganda? There is no such thing as a video filmed in North Korea that is not propaganda.

wowczarek• 14 days ago

A diplomatic mission established for the sake of establishing it and staff making the best out of their time there I can somewhat understand, but not tourism into DPRK for the "curious" and leaving money in that state. Going there to play golf would feel like visiting Pol Pot's Cambodia because they have good forest hikes, just be careful not to slip on all the blood seeping out of the ground.

As to the lack of fear of physical harm, this was reported from a very privileged position where that safety was guaranteed by the clearly willing host. As a civilian visitor I wouldn't feel that confident. One odd look or an unfortunate question an official didn't take a liking to, will get you into questioning. So I'm told.

rtkwe11• 14 days ago

There's still a large difference in the danger posed between an Iraq stationing and NK even as a generic tourist. You're much more at risk of angering the locals and becoming a political token if something should happen while you were there in NK but unless they were there before the US invasion there's a lot bigger threat of non-government groups attacking you in Iraq.

How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner

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