Use sanctions and talks to settle peninsula issue

Calling it "yet another serious violation" of its resolutions, the United Nations Security Council "strongly condemned" the latest test firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

But tough as it sounded, a verbal warning like this is unlikely to bring to a halt Pyongyang's nuclear-missile program.

Unless all stakeholders work in genuine solidarity and make the UN-authorized sanctions truly bite, there is little chance Pyongyang will change course. Previous warnings have always been a compromise due to the disagreements between and among stakeholding countries over the best approach to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, and they have failed to stop Pyongyang from making progress in its nuclear-missile program.