In the shadow of North Korea resuming provocations, why would someone who protested the Iraq War and opposed intervention in Libya consider war with North Korea, despite its risks and horrors, to be the least bad option?

To answer, put war aside and focus on America’s objectives with North Korea. These are many: promoting human rights, combating corruption, enforcing sanctions – but at a national level, three are unassailable:

- Thwarting nuclear attack;

- Deterring aggression against US allies; and,

- Preventing nuclear proliferation, especially to US adversaries and terrorists.

On thwarting a nuclear attack, observers argue that even if North Korea demonstrates an ability to reach the U.S. homeland with a nuclear weapon, Pyongyang would never contemplate it because doing so guarantees precisely what the regime seeks to prevent – its own destruction.

Let’s concede this, noting that it is an assumption that extends the logic of great states to a murderous and depraved cult. After all, if Pyongyang successfully conducts an ICBM-range nuclear test, three countries will be able to reach the U.S. with a nuclear weapon: Russia, China, and North Korea.

But this uncertain logic rests on an incorrect assumption – that North Korea will maintain only a minimum level of nuclear deterrent in perpetuity.

If North Korea maintains a minimum nuclear deterrent and no more – the ability to retaliate against the United States if attacked – one might legitimately argue that North Korea’s acquisition and sustainment of nuclear weapons is exclusively for regime survival.

This is wrong. Even if the regime is motivated entirely by developing a reliable second-strike capability and overcoming American ballistic missile defenses, a resumption of nuclear and missiles testing means that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal will ultimately extend well beyond any reasonable definition of a minimum deterrent.

So once North Korea has developed, as is inevitable, hundreds of nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of reaching the United States, is it credible that the regime’s ambitions will be limited to regime survival and that it may continue to be deterred in all instances?

Of course not. Once North Korea has the ability to obliterate the United States, Washington will be the one deterred. If North Korea conducts low-level nuclear attacks against regional US allies, or seeks to re-unify the peninsula by force, or proliferates nuclear weapons to state and non-state actors hostile to the United States, then how exactly is the US government able to respond? Indeed, how would Washington retaliate against North Korea launching a nuclear attack on Guam or Okinawa when the cost of threatening the regime is dozens of nuclear ICBMs striking the American homeland? For those advocating continued ‘strategic patience’, the inability or unwillingness to contend with this most basic question is a grave moral and intellectual failing.

The best that anyone has come up with is a denial that any of this will happen. Proponents of this view must somehow contend with the fact that North Korea already built a secret reactor for the Assad regime (destroyed by the Israelis), fired missiles over Japan, sunk a South Korean warship, and proliferated every weapon it has ever produced.

Should North Korea conduct a long-range nuclear test, it is in this backdrop that war on the peninsula becomes thinkable. This is because a future in which North Korea expands its long-range nuclear arsenal to the point of invulnerability, no matter the provocation, is one that the United States simply cannot live with.

Meanwhile, war with a nuclear-armed North Korea today, with all of its sobering risks, tens of thousands of allied casualties, millions of North Koreans killed, and the painful generations-long process of forced unification of the Korean people is still preferable, if only by the very darkest of comparisons.

Because of this, President Trump must be cut some slack. When faced with these choices, desperate for a third option, I too would have met with Kim Jong-un. I would have flattered his ego, debased the presidency, and promised a house of diamonds with gilded peacocks for a chance to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program without having to send marines across the 38^th parallel.

And it’s not true to say that Trump achieved nothing. His overtures bought precious time, pausing North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests at a critical inflection point, and delaying an otherwise inevitable war.

The risk is that Kim Jong un may now believe Trump has invested too much political capital in rapprochement to return to fire and fury, and that a significant provocation would induce concessions or acceptance rather than retaliation.

My hope is that the North Korean leader can be persuaded this would be a fatal miscalculation, as I believe it should be. Unfortunately, if those arguing for continued ‘strategic patience’ carry the day, Kim Jong-un may be proven right.

Crispin Rovere is an Australian public servant and professional poker player. Formerly he was a Ph.D. candidate at the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and has published on nuclear policy. Crispin is the author of The Trump Phenomenon: How One Man Conquered America.  

Image: Reuters.