NORTH Korea and US President Donald Trump have done something they love doing again and again. The North launches another ballistic missile and Trump responds with more macho-posturing.

Pyongyang has carried out more than two dozen missile tests since Kim Jong-un came to power in December 2012. It detonated two nuclear devices last year. Also last year, North Korea defied United Nations resolutions by using a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. There is increasing talk of another test — North Korea’s sixth — very soon.

The latest missile was launched on the eve of America’s Independence Day. This was intended to provoke the superpower. Worse still, the North claims that with the latest launch, it has crossed a milestone in its efforts to build nuclear weapons capable of hitting the mainland United States.

How can Trump or any American president remain silent in the face of such calculated affront to America’s dignity?

In the beginning, Trump was careful in his reaction. He called on China, the North’s main food and fuel provider,

to put heavy pressure on Pyongyang and “end this nonsense once and for all” to avoid any unilateral action by the US. But latest reports suggest that Washington has raised the specter of military action to deal with its recalcitrant Communist adversary. “The US is prepared to use the full range of our capabilities to defend ourselves and our allies,” Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, said at the Security Council. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the US commander in South Korea, was more explicit. He warned the North that his forces were prepared for “any war.”

Another “shock and awe” of the type Iraq witnessed in 2003 when Baghdad was ablaze with thick clouds of smoke rising high over the city as Anglo-American warplanes and cruise missiles attacked 1,000 targets across the country in a massive aerial bombardment?

The one refrain we heard in the run-up to Iraq war was that “doing nothing is not an option.” In the case of North Korea, doing anything is fraught with grave dangers. Trump’s predecessors were aware of it, including George W. Bush who knew he could not do anything more than granting the North membership in the “Axis of Evil” club. If three American presidents have tried diplomacy to deal with Pyongyang, it was not because they were disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. They were fully aware that even a limited war or sporadic bombing of the type Iraqis had to suffer before the full-scale war would invite North Korean retaliation. In a life- and-death struggle, the North would use “the full range of its capabilities”, putting millions of South Koreans, and 38,000 American troops, at risk.

So in spite of periodic bombasts, this president too would have to think of an option other than force to persuade the North to mend its ways.

This means a solution will eventually require direct dialogue with the North. On Tuesday, Chines President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin once again called for dialogue. Some of America’s most experienced nuclear experts, including a former Secretary of State George Shultz, had written to Trump urging him to begin talks as the “only realistic option” to prevent North Korea’s potential use of nuclear weapons.

It is pertinent to remember here that negotiations with the North did lead to a deal in 1994 that froze its nuclear program for nearly a decade. But the North is unlikely to agree to a freeze now. North Korea knows why Iraq was attacked and what happened to Libya after Muammar Qaddafi negotiated away his missile and nuclear programs.

So the US should not insist on denuclearization. Regime change too should be off the table. After seeing what happened in Iraq and Libya following Western intervention, even China would be wary of a regime change in the North, however distasteful the Kim Jong-un administration may be.