The Trump administration mistakenly views a nuclear-armed Pyongyang as an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security interests in East Asia, and thus, Trump’s advisers are grasping at straws for a solution.

One of the proposals circulating in the news media is what administration officials are calling the “bloody nose option” — a one-off strike on a specific facility somewhere in North Korea that would get Kim Jong Un’s attention and frighten him into a negotiation on the country’s nuclear weapons program. But like all ideas that seem too good to be true, this isolated attack scenario is a recipe for disaster. Far from driving Kim into the warm arms of diplomacy, punching him in the nose is likely to spark the very armed conflict U.S. military officials have been trying to prevent since the signing of the Korean War armistice 65 years ago.