JOSH ROGAN: An attack on North Korea would be massive – and massively stupid.

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, whom Trump reportedly is considering to replace H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, supports preventive war through a massive strike, if sanctions fail. During an appearance last week at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security, he said the United States would have to simultaneously destroy all known North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile sites, submarine bases, and artillery, mortar and missile installments along the North’s border with South Korea.

The Kim regime would soon collapse, Bolton predicted, which would then require the deployment of American and South Korean troops inside North Korea to secure the nuclear sites. China could, in advance, be offered a chance to participate, to protect its interests and minimize the adverse effects, Bolton said.

“My argument to China would be, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Bolton said. “I would like to find a way to convince the Chinese to do this with us, to have a controlled collapse of the North Korean regime.”

Bolton acknowledged that we can’t be sure of where Kim is hiding all his weapons and that there would be massive humanitarian consequences. But he calculated that the risks of Kim threatening the world with nuclear weapons or selling them to others outweigh the potential costs.

But a true accounting of those costs would also include the likelihood that the U.S.-South Korea alliance would be shattered, along with the regional stability the United States spent 70 years trying to build. The global economy would be thrown into disarray; America would be on the hook for untold billions in reconstruction and refugee assistance. China would then move to replace the United States as the responsible regional leader.

The risks of a preventative war might prove too high, but China must be made to understand that the risks of North Korean proliferation might include nuclear weapons for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.