Technically speaking I believe N.Korea and S.Korea are still at war. A cease fire was negotiated in 1953 but there was no peace treaty signed. Far as I know the U.S.A. has had a military presence in S.Korea since 1950...I wonder what the cumulative cost of this has been for almost 60 years. I have a son in the marines, stationed in Japan and possibly some time in S.Korea so any input I have about what we should do over there may be skewed by my desire to
avoid armed conflict in the far east. His "specialty" is amphibious assault ... I hope we're not planning a ground invasion.

First I'll play devils advocate - Why should we do anything? We have plenty of nuclear weapons what gives us the right to deny them to anyone else? The USA is the only country that has nuked anyone else when we fried hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens in Nagasaki and Hiroshima during WW II.

Maybe we should let China and Japan take care of their neighbor and stay out of it, but then how could we maintain being the world police so THAT isn't gonna happen.

A pre-emptive strike by us against N.Korea may wake up China which could be bad for us militarily...besides who'd make the crap that we buy at Walmart if we were at odds with China?

Why not stage a military coup, whack the leader of N. Korea and put in our puppet? Be alot cheaper than a long drawn out war...course the military industrial complex wouldn't make much money then so maybe we won't do that.

So that leaves us with diplomacy, sanctions and wagging our finger saying tsk tsk.