For too long, U.S. presidents of both parties have lived with the North Korean threat.  My guess is that they thought there were no pretty options, and it's easy to understand that, with millions of civilians living within range of North Korea's massive artillery.  Also, North Korea was just a loud dog for years, and not one that threatened to start a nuclear war.

We have now reached the point where North Korea's insane behavior is unsustainable.  In other words, one of those missiles is going to hit a ship, a city, or U.S. troops on the border.  It's like having a kid walking around with an AK-47 and making the neighborhood rather uncomfortable.

Therefore, it's perfectly reasonable for President Trump to talk so much about the threat, as Claudia Rosett wrote:

Pyongyang, with its totalitarian, dynastic Kim regime, has bedeviled American presidents, both Democratic and Republican, for decades. But after years of Obama's passive policy of "strategic patience," the threat posed by North Korea has soared.

Kim's regime clearly feels free to brag up its prowess in developing deliverable nuclear weapons, threatening strikes on America and advertising its program to develop submarine-launched ballistic missiles – prototypes of which North Korea this Saturday paraded through the streets of Pyongyang. 

Pyongyang is now on the verge of a sixth nuclear test – four of its five tests to date having been conducted on Obama's watch (in 2009, 2013 and two tests in 2016)[.] ...

All this is part of the Obama legacy: the rising global agglomerate of emboldened tyrannies, with which Trump must now deal. 

Call it the Axis of Opportunism.  

Call it whatever we want.  I prefer to call it a problem that has to be fixed.

North Korea used to be that terrible dictatorship that held massive military parades while the people ate grass or whatever they could find.

Well, the people are still starving, but the leadership is firing missiles and threatening to hit the U.S.

They used to be crazy, but now they are seriously dangerous.

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