The dramatic events of recent months—and, above all, North Korea’s second nuclear test and long-range missile launch—demonstrated once again that the Barack Obama administration and the international community at large have failed to achieve their goal in dealing with North Korea. This goal has been stated clearly and often: to prevent the emergence of a nuclear-armed North Korea. By now a nuclear North Korea is a hard fact of international life, and no amount of legalistic word play with definitions of what it means to be “nuclear” can change this. To aggravate things even further, it seems that North Korea is also well on its way toward acquiring long-range missile capabilities as well. It is time to realize what the reasons are for this failure and also to think of strategies that might produce a desirable result—a stable, non-nuclear Korean peninsula. In this presentation the author will argue in favor of just such a strategy, a strategy that might be described as “destructive engagement.”