UN wars

Sometimes it is necessary for the UN, or whoever is the global nanny, to step into a country with force to end government-led atrocities. Here's a sketch of one way to do it, and when I see it as being appropriate. First, how to do it, then when to do it is based on the cost of how to do it.

1. Make a point to preserve police, courts, sewage, electricity, as much functioning goverment as possible.
2. Take out the government as efficiently as possible. Usually this only requires killing or displacing the leader, but that itself often requires defeating the military.
3. Replace the leader with overstaffed martial law. The martial law should prevent war, but otherwise should defer to civil law and courts.
4. Once the country is conquered, estimate the value of all real estate. If this is already known, use the existing valuations of property.
5. Divide the country into small districts of roughly equal real estate value. The regions should be big enough that cities are not split.
6. Have primaries to elect new candidate leaders.
7. Have an election for whether districts want a new leader, or want to merge with any neighboring country.
8. Follow the results of the election. If regions select n different leaders, they split into n countries.
9. For districts that are isolated, have a second election with a restricted set of choices of just their local leaders and new neighbors. If this still leaves isolated districts, so be it.
10. Anyone who is not happy with the results, set up a market for their real estate to be swapped with others unhappy with the results, and have them move to someplace they are happier with. Allow them to take their non-real-estate wealth with them.

This is a tremendous disruption to the citizens even if it goes smoothly. It causes people to move, breaking social ties and business connections. And there can be a lot of death and destruction removing the current government. Often the displaced population will remember the previous arrangement centuries, and agitate for restoring it. So, this is not justified unless the cost is expected to be less than the benefit. The country has to be actively killing people and destoying/confiscating propery at a greater rate than this cure would cause, and they would have to have been doing it for years, because the cure usually takes a long time too.

For example, let's apply this to North Korea. This procedure would take out Kim Jong-un, maybe by defeating the military. It would have North Korea split between South Korea, China, and staying as North Korea but with a new leader, based on the votes of the citizens of North Korea. And it is currently not quite justified. North Korea does seem to be actively killing its citizens and using them as slave labor, but it is not harming anyone outside of North Korea. It would be justified if North Korea starts dropping nukes on populated places.

North Korea has extenuating circumstances: North Korea is essentially a province of China. So declaring war on NK is declaring war on China. This leaves China with a free hand to be the global nanny to NK, but not the US or UN.