Perhaps, but there is the reality that Americans will have to come to grips with: when you deal with a quasi totalitarian country that doesn’t care about its citizens, then you are limited. Yes, they MAY have a stronger interest there, but what’s in it for them may be far, far less than what’s in it for us.
We might, for example, be able to crush Mexico like an insect for something they did, but for the Chinese to come to Baja and do it in our back yard would be much harder. Likewise, when you run on “no foreign wars,” yet the likelihood that this NORK nut wants a war means you might have to violate that, then you have to decide which is more important, a relatively better/worse trade deal or another foreign involvement.
George Washington and John Adams paid tribute to the Barbary Pirates because we didn’t have a big enough navy to challenge them and even when we did, we just had other priorities. For the time being, it was worth the price.
The price however always changes, and if the NORKs are put away, China knows that they cannot go back to the way they were.
But it’s easy to say “We want to crush the NORKS, yet have no boots on the ground, yet also get everything we wanted from China.” Won’t happen.
I think you summed that up as well as anyone. Agreed.
I’m tired of our boys being buried on foreign soil, and the Korean Peninsula is one of them. Let the Asian’s deal with their part of the world, especially when they’ve caused their own problems.