When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile this week — what its boy tyrant called a "gift to the American bastards" — the response from the Trump administration was fairly conventional.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson correctly called it an escalation. He brought the matter before the United Nations Security Council. And he assured, "We will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea."
If that sounds familiar, it's because not tolerating a nuclear North Korea has been a pillar of U.S. policy since the peninsula's first nuclear crisis in the early 1990s. Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of this regime is an admirable goal; a government is hardly a model of restraint if its prisons are so vast they can be seen from space. And a few years ago, it might have even been an achievable goal. But in 2017, it is at best quaint and at worst delusional.