Apart from U.S. President Donald Trump's need for a dramatic foreign policy initiative, is there any good reason why we are having a crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons testing now?
If the Pyongyang regime is really planning an underground nuclear test soon, as Washington alleges, it will be the sixth bomb test it has carried out, not the first. That hardly qualifies as a new development that requires urgent action. The same goes for its ballistic missile tests, which have been ongoing for many years. Nothing new is going on in North Korea.
In South Korea, on the other hand, things are about to change a lot.