Not that I believe he is, but if Alon Ben Meir was on the take from North Korea I could not see how this article would be any different from how it is.

North Korea settled in communes or "kib-uts" in South Korea to grow olives in the land promised by Karl Marx centuries ago. After bombing the stone-throwing , ragged mobs from the Western Banks ,it built nukes of the dear leader Einst-un who was attacked by Allah Hitler for having Jewish science.

I see that there is a proposal in the UN to ban all oil imports to Nth Korea.
That is the one thing that would collapse Nth Korea without a shot
being fired. However I think China will veto it.
There is an alternative, drones that fire explosives into the Nth
Korean tank farm. That would collapse that country in a week or two.
It could be completely deniable "What me !"

Another possibility that must be being examined would be an attack
like those that have taken out numerous ISIS critical personal.

With proper preparation it could be so deniable that no one could tell if it was China or the US.

The United States and its ally or allies are deterred now. If nothing is done to change it now, they will have to remain deterred in the future, no matter what North Korea will do in the future.

Alon Ben-Meir appears to be asleep at the wheel. Where was he during the past few decades where the US and US negotiated with NK, giving them oil and removing US nukes from SK soil. NK took the money oil and light water reactor and promised not to develop its own nukes, all the while doing exactly that.

Not only should the US extend the sanctions, but move some of its short range nuke missiles into SK and set about installing a missile shield that can shoot down NK's ICBMs before they leave the atmosphere and deploy countermeasures. This will surely piss off China as it will degrade their deterrence and hopefully, do more to motivate them to take real action against NK.

NK's military while numerically strong is poorly trained and equipped and even in a confrontation with SK alone would be defeated in weeks. NK has always relied on deterrence based on a large artillery force to inflict mass casualties on SK.

What NK needs to be made to realise is that there is no scenario in which it uses a nuke that would result in its survival. A heavy blockade of sanctions will make it realise the cost of maintaining a deterrence that it can never use.

Korean culture is more Confucian or Chinese than Chinese culture is.

There are three Confucian societies in the world, China, Vietnam and Korea. I understand Vietnam fought China more than eighty times in the past two thousand years. Korean culture is more Confucian than Chinese culture is
"The Koreans in the early Yi dynasty(1392~1910) adopted Confucianism with such enthusiasm that their value system and social practices were restructured along Chinese lines more fully than ever before. Since Korea was a relatively small country, and thus a more manageable and homogeneous unit than the sprawling Chinese Empire, it may have become more uniformly and fully permeated by Confucian ideas than China was itself. In fact Korea became in many ways an almost model Confucian society...The Koreans also developed a very literal but sincere devotion to Confucian principles and an almost fanatical adherence to Confucian rituals. Another result of this emphasis on Confucian scholarship may have been a narrowing of the range of intellectual interests and a growing dogmatism of thought...the Chu Hsi school of Neo-Confucianism became established as the only acceptable interpretation...Chu Hsi's doctorines became in time even more narrowly restrictive in Korea than they were in China (Edwin O. Reischauer, Chapter 12. Yi Dynasty Korea: A Model Confucian Society, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, co-authored by J. K. Fairbank and A. M. Craig, Houghton Mufflin & Tuttle)."