The new president is going to have a lot on his plate, not the least of which is a nuclear North Korea.

Let’s start with a basic truth: Despite our best efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, an effort spread over three American presidencies, North Korea will likely be able to reach the Pacific Northwest with a nuclear-armed missile within a few years.

Let me be clear. By the end of Donald Trump Donald John TrumpOmar fires back at Trump over rally remarks: 'This is my country' Pelosi: Trump hurrying to fill SCOTUS seat so he can repeal ObamaCare Trump mocks Biden appearance, mask use ahead of first debate MORE’s first term, we could be facing an isolated, pathological little gangster state able to obliterate Seattle.

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Given North Korea’s stumbling development program for devices (five tests, more or less successful), ongoing troubles with missile launches (two medium-range failures last month) and the remaining challenge of making a warhead small and rugged enough to survive re-entry, it might not be a high-confidence shot.

But, then, what odds would you be comfortable with?

It’s not that we haven’t been trying to forestall this. We’ve had four-party talks, six-party talks, the Agreed Framework. We’ve tried international isolation, U.S. sanctions, U.N. sanctions, Chinese pressure, even “strategic patience.” Some political scientist is going to make a killing writing a book comparing and contrasting all these approaches.

The common denominator of all this has been a near relentless development of weapons and delivery systems. Current estimates put the North’s fissile material stocks in the range of 20 weapons’ worth, and it has twice used a version of its Taepodong long-range missile to put a satellite into orbit.

We shouldn’t have been surprised that they would persevere.

Jim Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, made a little news last month when he declared that “the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause.” But for more than a decade, the informal consensus in the American intelligence community has been precisely that.

The regime’s worldview is that it is isolated, surrounded by relentlessly hostile forces, condemned to depend on no one but itself.

Much of that is the product of the regime’s own barbaric behavior, but from Pyongyang’s point of view, its nuclear program — as Clapper accurately concludes — “is their ticket to survival.” In the world of Kim Jong Un and his generals, they would be fools to give it up.

And so here we are, on a seemingly inexorable arc — at least within our current definition of acceptable risk for any of our counter moves.

So is it time to change that definition of acceptable risk? And what that might look like?

We could “break right,” so to speak, get tougher and really raise the costs to North Korea or even prevent its nuclear progress.

Ten years ago, a former secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, and a future one, Ash Carter, felt so strongly about a North Korean test launch that they wrote, “if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched.”

Pretty strong stuff. So too would be an actual policy to do what the Kim regime already believes we are doing: using covert and overt means to destabilize its hold on an imprisoned population.

Then again, we could “break left” and give Pyongyang what it says it wants: recognition as a nuclear power and as a “normal” state; direct talks followed by a peace agreement with the United States; and an end to what the North describes as America’s “hostile policies.”

It’s hard to predict what all the sub-paragraphs would be on that last demand before we got any measure of nuclear restraint or transparency. It might make breaking left even less appealing than breaking right.

Then there is the bit more restrained, but still meaningful, “actions have consequences” approach. Here the intended audience would be China, not North Korea, on the theory that Pyongyang’s chief benefactor should be putting a lot more pressure on the North.

China doesn’t because it believes that current circumstances are tolerable, or at least more tolerable than potential instability, refugee flows or a unified Korea integrated with the West.

None of those are inevitable, by the way, but Beijing would rather live with today’s painful toothache than chance the root canal or oral surgery.

So we might want to allow the tooth to hurt more — not maliciously, but as a byproduct of steps logically taken because of North Korea’s actions.

The recent decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea was clearly a prudent defense measure. That it inevitably also amped up radar coverage of a big chunk of northeast China — to bitter Chinese disapproval — well, that’s just unfortunate. We’d probably get the some reaction by putting THAAD in Japan, too. Or in any other ally within the threat rings of North Korean missiles.

While we’re at it, we’d probably want to make U.S. missile defenses facing the Pacific Basin a lot stronger, too, even if it might begin to erode the deterrent value of China’s modest nuclear force.

We could even revisit the decision to pull American nuclear weapons out of South Korea, or the rate at which American nuclear-capable ships visit Chinese/Korean waters, or perhaps restrictions we have demanded be placed on South Korea’s civilian nuclear industry.

Then there is doubling down on secondary sanctions — sanctions not on North Korea but on Chinese firms that do business with the Hermit Kingdom, and on firms who do business with them.

This is all tough — and dangerous — stuff. But, to be fair, is there anything more dangerous than maintaining today’s course?

Probably not. So welcome aboard and over to you, Mr. President-elect.

Did I tell you about Seattle?

Gen. Michael Hayden is a former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.