Am I afraid of a North Korean ICBM targeting Anchorage? No.
Do I worry about unrest in North Korea potentially upsetting the balance of power in East Asia? Yes.
Do I worry that the United States (and our new $11 billion base outside of Seoul) is wholly unprepared for regime change in North Korea (even if it's a positive one)? Yes.
Do I believe these issues were confounded by two terms of utterly inept foreign policy decisions?
. . .
Yeah.
What exactly should the last administration have done about North Korea that the previous ones before him already failed to do other than military strike? He enacted sanctions. What other diplomatic options should he have tried?
Trump is enacting sanctions on Venezuela. As we've already seen, Trump has pressed China to do something about North Korea and he's already perturbed they are basically not doing anything about it. He sucked up his pride and took back all the mean things he tweeted and said about China on the campaign trail to get them to put a leash on NK and they don't seem to be doing anything to fix it.
The only way Kim gets removed without international military intervention is if it's from some courageous coupe from the inside, or China oversteps their boundaries. But I wouldn't be surprised if China stepped over the line and Kim attacked them should China go that route.
I always read conservatives saying Obama "didn't do enough". Just want some of you to stop pussyfooting and say you wanted him to bomb and use military intervention in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, etc. Perhaps not every single of those on that list you agree with Hawk, but I'm speaking more of some of the righties on here in general. Obama already gets chided for pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan too soon. But I never actually hear what the alternative they wanted was. How long was the right willing to have big troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan? It's almost 2018. We went to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. 17 and 15 years respectively almost. We're still conducting special operations in Afghanistan, and still have troops engaged in combat in Iraq. What was the endgame that conservatives wanted to see play out in the long run?
Trump isn't going after Assad because he knows the alternative to Assad is gonna be a bigger blackhole than Iraq was for ISIS for at least a decade.