NK is sufficiently isolated on all sides with it's primary escape route being China, as it has always been. It is a severe threat to only two countries that come to mind, and that , of course is South Korea and Japan.
All this hand wringing about the threat to the U.S. is simply that. "hand wringing"
So what do we do?
I think exactly what we have been doing. We have applied steady pressure via isolating sanctions and the six party talks as a way out. Eventually, it will bear fruit at some point in the future, but time is not yet at a premium in this case. We are monitoring their imports and exports, and if need be, can close tham off to everyone but China.
Iran is simply exploiting them to provoke us, and that is a technique that they use to great satisfaction, but we can't fall for it militarily. It is a diplomatic problem. Iran will be ramping up their exploitation of Venezuela as well, and here we have far more interests, as we have oil assets in the country, and import a great deal of product from Chavez.
Venezuela causes us much more heartburn then NK ever will. NK's new ICBM is garbage. It is inaccurate and unreliable. They cannot depend on it to even stay intact through the supersonic portion of the flight path and the stage deployment is faulty. Even if they have a nuclear package that would fit the payload requirements, which I doubt, the chance of delivering it to our shores are practically nil. They would have a much better chance of driving it across the Mexican border. But they can hit Japan. Japan will do the things it needs to do, in order to prevent this, and I suspect they are well on the way to doing it and we will certainly assist in every way..
We will never be required to meet their (NK's) Armies on the ground in a face to face way. We will hit them from the sea and the air.
Never again will we enter those mountains. We learned that expensive lesson in 1951. It would be a fools errand to do so again.
IMHO
Thank you.
Very clear. Thank you.