No Stupid Questions

People in power in the west are barely moving the needle for their own people sadly.

Also even if they did, they'd still need a valid cause to start an international conflict I think, it's why Russia tried the "it's actually russians in Ukraine that are being oppressed and we're liberating them" excuse

It’s more that there’s little that can be done that doesn’t also risk making the situation much worse.

Something like going to war to depose Kim would lead to mass death and risk spilling over into a much wider conflict since North Korea has the backing of China.

It seems as though unfortunately any people with the capacity for empathy never end up in positions of real power... :(

It's not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it's very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don't leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.

Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they've gone through (and not always against the right people). They've learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.

At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can't do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It's not that we enjoy the fighting, it's that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.

On the other hand, even that hasn't helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we've tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don't know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn't seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we're not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven't figured those out either. Just because we're doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn't mean we've got it all figured out or even that we're doing anything right at all.

It's one of the most heavily fortified countries with an extreme nuclear power regime out in the mountains. How could a country like the United States help North Koreans without threatening intense military conflict?

no one with political power gets that power through empathy

Is that hard to believe?