ANALYSIS/OPINION:

President Donald Trump, as the media’s been steadily reporting for hours now, has vowed to respond to North Korea’s ongoing threats against the United States with “fire and fury.”

The timid have gasped. But the truth is: North Korea deserves this response. The regime brought it on itself. And without a doubt, Trump’s hardline approach and don’t-mess-with-America rhetoric beats the eight years of apology, diplomacy and wait-and-see butt-kissing that was part and parcel of the Barack Obama playbook for foreign affairs.

Trump said this: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

He then added this: “As I said, they will be met with fire and fury and frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

North Korea, which has been sending various messages of aggression America’s way — not just recently, but for years, in prior administrations — weighed in after Trump’s comment by announcing, via a statement from its army to state-run news, that it’s evaluating plans to attack Guam, home of America’s Andersen Air Force Base.

Not to be outdone — or bullied — Trump took to Twitter and shot back yet another sharp retort.

“My first order as president was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal,” he wrote, in a thinly veiled reminder of America’s superpower status. “It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”

Trump also tweeted that he hoped “we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”

What a blessing to have a president who’s not afraid to meet fire with bigger fire.

If this were a Hillary Clinton White House, no doubt America would be cowering in a Security Council corner, huddling heads to come up with the next best strongly worded statement to issue in the adoring press.

And we already know by experience — the chosen path of a Clinton presidency would’ve been the same one walked by Obama.

“Patient Diplomacy and a Reluctance to Act: Obama’s Mark on Foreign Policy,” ran an NPR headline in September 2016 — as if that’s a good thing.

As if that’s a strategy that puts America in a position of power on the world stage. Subtitle it: How Obama’s Foreign Policy Belittled America and Bolstered Radicalism and Jihad.

Heck, the Heritage Foundation even kept a running list of Obama’s many, many occasions of putting down America. It’s called, “Barack Obama’s Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower.” And that list came in June of 2009 — back when Obama was just getting started.

By 2016, we were getting headlines like this, from Cal Thomas — “The ‘apology tour’ comes full circle: In Cuba, Obama once again sides with oppressors against America.”

So note to Trump language police: Quit whining.

When a playground bully steals your lunch money, you don’t ask nicely for it back. You punch him in the gut and grab it from his pocket. Problem solved.

When a North Korea bully threatens to sic his military on U.S. properties, you don’t scurry to the United Nations for consolation and sympathy and expressions of outrage. You threaten back — ten-fold.

That’s the language of bullies. That’s what you do. It may not be pretty — it may not be comforting to the squeamish and unschooled. But it doesn’t change the fact that when bullies threaten, when bullies intimidate, you meet like with like and put the ball in their court to stand down — or not.

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