Sky Views: How to start a war with North Korea

President Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy was simple: "Speak softly, and carry a big stick."

Big Stick diplomacy, the combination of negotiation with visible US firepower, won him the Panama Canal, and later the Nobel Peace Prize, for his part in the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese war.

So far, President Trump seems to be going for more of a - tweet volubly, and confuse your allies - approach.

This is not necessarily a function of time in office - Roosevelt set out his policy two weeks before becoming president.

This matters as it may shortly be put to the test.

There is renewed activity at North Korea's nuclear test site - another test may be imminent.

The Kim regime claims to be in the final stages of being able to test an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of reaching the US mainland.

This is on top of the two nuclear tests, 20 missile tests, and long-range rocket launch it carried out last year, and in spite of renewed sanctions and international condemnation.

If the Trump administration has a plan - it has yet to be articulated.

In Seoul last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said all options were on the table, including pre-emptive military strikes, while thousands of US troops took part in large-scale military exercises with South Korea, reportedly including the Navy Seal team that killed Osama Bin Laden.

At the same time, he told the North Korean leadership it had nothing to fear from the United States.

You don't need to be a paranoid despot to spot the contradictions.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has tweeted that North Korea's intercontinental ballistic test "won't happen" and said that Kim Jong-Un is behaving "very, very badly" but has yet to lay out much more of his thinking on the subject, beyond his frustration at a perceived lack of help from China.

To be fair to the president, successive administrations have grappled with, and failed at, this before his.

There are no good options, but the window for buck-passing is closing.

More sanctions could be imposed, but North Korea is already one of the world's most sanctioned and isolated states.

The country has survived significantly worse in relatively recent memory. Up to 2.5 million of its citizens died in the famine of the mid-1990s, the true figure remains unknown.

There is also an an argument that the harder life gets, the more threatened the regime feels, the more it will choose weapons over bread.

So what of the headline-grabbing threat of military strikes?

Much like the myth of the "surgical strike" - pre-emptive strikes sound proportionate and manageable - a calculated response to a known threat, carried out by precision weapons systems from a distance, with no US troops on the ground.

The reality would likely be very different.

Following Mr Tillerson's comments, a number of analysts have imagined how this would play out - I have yet to read a scenario that does not include massive retaliation from North Korea, huge loss of civilian life, and the very real risk of the resumption of large-scale conventional war on the Korean peninsula.

So unless you're comfortable starting a war, or watching Kim Jong-Un figure out a way to mount his nuclear weapons onto intercontinental ballistic missiles while we wait for the sanctions to kick in, that leaves negotiation.

It might be unpalatable, and risk the appearance of capitulation to nuclear blackmail, but at this stage it also looks like the least worst option.

And who knows, maybe there's a way for the "dealmaker" president to spin it as the ultimate deal.