Give up on stopping North Korea

In 2017, though, Haley’s warnings and the cruder ones from her boss, President Donald Trump, are disconnected from reality. And here it’s important to remember why the president and his envoys are making threats in the first place. All of this is in the service of a discredited policy to not allow North Korea to obtain a nuclear weapon. The idea has been to threaten, coddle and tempt Kim Jong Un to start negotiations that would lead to him abandoning them.

Well, this is never going to happen. America and her allies have been trying this for about a quarter century and the North Koreans burn us every time. Now North Korea only needs to perfect a nuclear warhead that can survive re-entry into the atmosphere to have a credible nuclear threat against the U.S. As Michael Auslin, a fellow in contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, told me this week: “That’s only a matter of time. It’s a technical issue at this point. They are going to get it.”