We are at war because of pitiful pacifism and the deep rooted damage it has done to our country and it's security. We blow stuff up and kill people in order to make countries at play today understand we mean what we say. Doing so today will assure our peace for the future. Americans confused the gangs occupying the badlands of the globe since the early 80's. We gave them the tacit go-ahead to do what they will by saying, "please don't do that or we'll be disappointed, and then please don't do that or we might reduce your foreign aide, and if you'll listen to us we'll increase your foreign aide" ad nauseum for twenty years now! The North Korean mess is our doing for being indecisive, transmitting confusing signals, codifying awful governments in the name of cultural respect, and so on......
The cure for this indifference to American requests made in a reasonable, calm fashion, respecting a nation's sovereignty and peoples is to use diplomacy just once and do it loud and clear. If they think we are doing that same o'l carrot-stick routine, destroy them back into the stone age. It's better for us and less confusing to them.
We really do confuse the world with our silly preoccupation with compassion. Not one dictator or Marxist regime in the world gives a wit about compassion, puppies, children, or hunger. To the rest of the world, peoples are an enormous expenditure that is the first to go when expenditures exceed the cost of a new palace or a boatload of long dong II missiles. Their only value is to lay their bloated dead corpses in the street for American media, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera. Who or what killed them is irrelevant. They are off the books.