What to do about North Korea

This is a wonderful, if impossible, analysis of what has happened and what to do about it.  I highly recommend the whole thing, but I've boiled it down...

 

THE North Korean nuclear test — if that indeed is what it was — signals the catastrophic collapse of a dozen years of American policy. Over that period, two of the world's most dangerous regimes, Pakistan and North Korea, have developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them. Iran, arguably the most dangerous of them all, will surely follow, unless some dramatic action is soon taken.  It is, alas, an iron law of modern diplomacy that the failure of any diplomatic process only proves the need for more of the process that has just failed... 

 

[T]he United States should adopt four swift policy responses:

1. Step up the development and deployment of existing missile defense systems.
2. End humanitarian aid to North Korea and pressure South Korea to do the same.
3. Invite Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore to join NATO
4. Encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent.

Countries like North Korea and Iran seek nuclear weapons because they imagine that those weapons will enhance their security and power. The way to contain them is to convince them otherwise. When nonproliferation can be prevented by negotiation, that is always preferred. But when negotiation fails, as it has failed in North Korea and is failing in Iran, rogue regimes must be made to suffer for their dangerous nuclear ambitions.