North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has done it. His military apparatus has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile — successfully at that!
The communists in Pyongyang now apparently have the means to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon. Yes? U.S. military and intelligence officials are analyzing the launch.
What is the U.S. option? None of them is good.
A pre-emptive military strike is seemingly out of the question. It would provoke Kim Jong Un to launch an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. And as MSBNC military analyst Jack Jacobs — a Vietnam War Medal of Honor recipient — said this morning while referencing the capital of South Korea, “Seoul is just footsteps away from the demilitarized zone.”
Jacobs believes strong economic sanctions are the most effective immediate answer to preventing North Korea from doing something amazingly stupid, which would be to provoke a war with the United States.
North Korea is a poor nation that has spent almost all its national fiscal treasure on its military machine. The tinhorn dictator doesn’t care one bit, of course, about the citizens of his country.
It would be easy to say that here is where Donald J. Trump would earn his presidential salary, except that Trump supposedly isn’t getting paid to be president.
I’ll just stick with the notion that the president needs to weigh his options … very carefully.