After campaigning on the untenable promise that he would meet with leaders like Kim Jong Il without preconditions, President Obama has actually approached North Korea with a firmness that sometimes eluded the Bush administration in its last year. The Obama administration has strengthened trilateral security coordination with Japan and South Korea; implemented tough UN Security Council sanctions against the North after its nuclear tests; and rebuffed Chinese pressure for emergency Six-Party Talks in the wake of Pyongyang’s unprovoked attacks on South Korea. Given the North’s escalating provocations and nuclear cheating and Beijing’s dangerous complacency, this is the only strategy that has a prospect of deterring further belligerency and reversing the incentives the North sees in proliferation on the peninsula and beyond.