In dealing with North Korea's test-firing of a missile designed to hit the USA, our worst mistake would be to rule out pre-emptive military action. Appeasement would be received by Pyongyang not as an olive branch but as an American surrender to ballistic blackmail.
That's not to say the United States should immediately invade. But it is vital to recognize that North Korea's latest display of firepower is the gambit of an outlaw government that for years has survived on nothing more than its talent for thuggery and international extortion.
In 1994, when Kim Jong Il took over from his late father, North Korea was pursuing the nuclear bomb. Hoping to coax Kim into the civilized fold, the United States led the way in setting up a nuclear-freeze deal, in which a consortium of nations sent North Korea fuel and food, and began building Kim two modern nuclear reactors.
Kim pocketed the aid for his military, starved to death an estimated 1 to 2 million North Koreans, test-fired a missile in 1998 over Japan, sold missiles to the Middle East and cheated on the nuclear freeze. When U.S. diplomats finally confronted North Korea in 2002 over its secret uranium enrichment program, Kim's regime declared it had every right to nuclear weapons, fired up its old Yongbyon nuclear plant, renounced the non-proliferation treaty, threatened the United States, Japan and South Korea with a "sea of fire" and "total war," and in 2004 invited a U.S. delegation to come gaze upon a sample of plutonium.
