A review of Trump's arguments for his potential candidacy at that point would sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the 2016 election. But there is one difference: Trump gained a lot of attention for suggesting that he would initiate a preemptive strike against North Korea to prevent its development of a nuclear weapon — a position worth remembering in the wake of another weapons test in the country.

Seventeen years ago, the idea prompted a slew of headlines (as clearly desired). "Trump Sees N. Korea Peril, Eyes Nukes, Sez U.S. Gets Ripped Off by Friends," the New York Daily News wrote. The AP was more measured: "Trump calls Yeltsin 'a disaster,' would weigh bombing North Korea." A New Zealand newspaper mocked Trump: "He issued a press kit in which he said he was qualified because he once built an ice rink in Central Park and had come to appreciate the difficulties of dealing with governments. It could not possibly be any more difficult whipping China, North Korea and Iraq into line than it had been taming the bureaucrats of New York's Parks Department."

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A conversation with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in October 1999 gained some infamy during the Republican primaries thanks to Trump's insistence during it that he was "very pro-choice." But Trump also did his best to defend his proposal on North Korea to his skeptical interviewer.

RUSSERT: You say that you, as president, would be willing to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea's nuclear capability. TRUMP: First, I'd negotiate. I would negotiate like crazy. And I'd make sure that we tried to get the best deal possible. ... The biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation. And we have a country out there, North Korea, which is sort of wacko, which is not a bunch of dummies. And they are going out and they are developing nuclear weapons. And they're not doing it because they're having fun doing it. They're doing it for a reason. And wouldn't it be good to sit down and really negotiate something and ideally negotiate. Now, if that negotiation doesn't work, you'd better solve the problem now than solve it later, Tim. And you know it and every politician knows it, and nobody wants to talk about it.

Russert circled back to the idea of bombing, though, citing two military experts who pointed out that bombing North Korea's nuclear facilities would create fallout as the radioactive material from their ordnance would spread.

"Do you want to do it in five years when they have warheads all over the place, every one of them pointing to New York City, to Washington and every one of ours — is that when you want to do it, or do you want to do something now?" Trump replied. "You'd better do it now. And if they think you're serious — I deal with lots of people — if they think you're serious, they'll negotiate, and it'll never come to that."

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That argument mirrors one Trump has made this year. He has insisted that the United States must be willing to reject previous commitments to protect allies — including South Korea — to gain negotiation leverage aimed at bringing costs down, given the national debt. (Most of the national debt is a function of spending on social services, such as Social Security and Medicare. Relatively speaking, very little is spent on supporting military operations in the Korean peninsula.)

"The biggest threat to the world is nuclear weapons and the nuclear warheads that are being built in North Korea and other places," Trump said in 1999, according to the Daily News. "The Korean situation scares me more than China, but China has to be spoken to."

During his current presidential run, Trump sees China as the answer to the North Korea problem. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer pressed him on the subject 17 years ago, Trump said that "we have to sit down with the Russians and many others" and that "we better do something rather quickly with [North Korea], hopefully through negotiations." If not, a preemptive strike couldn't be ruled out. In January though, he told Blitzer that a preemptive strike was now off the table because "China has total control over them, and we have total control over China."

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That's a bit different from his tweets about North Korea in the intervening years. Some focused on a denial of a claim from Dennis Rodman that Trump was thinking about traveling to North Korea with him during Rodman's weird mission to the country a few years ago. Others reinforced the idea that South Korea is taking advantage of us and that China could solve the problem quickly.

Trump ended up not running for president 16 years ago, of course. Nor did he end up supporting the Reform Party's candidate, Pat Buchanan, telling Russert that "he's a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays." In 2016, the time was right for his own run.