"europe-west-9 (Paris) has been physically flooded [...], but has zero impact elsewhere."
I am afraid this is not true. We have nothing in europe-west-9, but problem in this region caused global problem with Cloud Console, which hit us, because we were not able to use it for several hours.
"Cloud Console: Experienced a global outage, which has been mitigated. Management tasks should be operational again for operations outside the affected region (europe-west9). Primary impact was observed from 2023-04-25 23:15:30 PDT to 2023-04-26 03:38:40 PDT."
The US has sent large quantities of food and fuel. Specifically during famine periods (when uprisings would otherwise have been likely) but also at other times. The US gave these goods specifically to the regime allowing them to control the food supply AND keep their forces mobile when otherwise they would have faced a starving population with very limited military capacity.
It's been a very weird thing to watch for 20 years: when it looks like the North Korean system might fail, the US leads assistance to it. Then when it recovers and returns to it's weapons program the US does nothing. That's how we got into a place where North Korea has functional nuclear weapons and will soon have the missiles to deliver them to the whole USA. At that point the US will just have to keep subsidising the regime. It's been decades of mismanagement of the situation over at least 4 administrations.
