They say that most of the world's real dangers arise not because of what people don't know but because of what they do "know" that just ain't so.

As a case in point, consider three things about Korea that the bipartisan Washington establishment seems quite sure of but are far removed from reality:

Delusion 1: All options, including U.S. military force, are "on the table."

- Everyone knows there are no military "options" the U.S. could use against North Korea that don't result in disaster. The prospect that a "surgical strike" could "take out" (a muscular-sounding term much loved by laptop bombardiers) Pyongyang's nuclear and missile capabilities is a fiction. Already impractical when considered against a country like Iran, no one believes a limited attack could eliminate North Korea's ability to strike back, hard. At risk would be not only almost 30,000 U.S. troops in Korea but 25 million people in the Seoul metropolitan area, not to mention many more lives at risk in the rest of South Korea and perhaps Japan.

- Hence, any contemplated U.S. preemptive strike would have to be massive from the start, imposing a ghastly cost on North Koreans (do their lives count?) but still running the risk that anything less than total success would mean a devastating retaliation. That's not even taking into account possible actions of other countries, notably China's response to an American attack on their detestable buffer state.

Delusion 2: North Korea must be denuclearized.

- Whether anyone likes it or not, North Korea is a nuclear weapons state outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and will remain so. Kim Jong-un learned the lessons of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Because Kim has weapons of mass destruction, especially nukes, he gets to stay alive and in power. If he gives them up, he can look forward to dancing the Tyburn jig or getting sodomized with a bayonet, then shot. That's not a difficult choice.

Delusion 3: If the U.S. presses China hard enough, Beijing will solve the problem for us.

- There is no combination of U.S. sanctions, threats, or pressures that will make Beijing take steps that are fundamentally contrary to China's vital national security interests. (Here, the "vital national security" of China means just that, not the way U.S. policymakers routinely abuse the term to mean anything they don't like even if it has nothing to do with American security, much less with America's survival.) Aside from speculation (which is all it is) that China could seek to engineer an internal coup to overthrow Kim in favor of a puppet administration, maintaining the current odious regime is Beijing's only option if they don't want to face the prospect of having on their border a reunited Korean peninsula under a government allied with Washington.

- After Moscow's experience with the expansion of NATO following the 1990 reunification of Germany, why would Beijing take credibly any assurances from Washington (of which there is no indication anyway) not to expand into a vacuum created by a collapse of North Korea? Quite to the contrary, it has been suggested that if China refuses to deal with the North Korea problem on Washington's behalf, then the U.S. would do it on its terms, presenting Beijing (in the description of former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton) with "regime collapse, huge refugee flows and U.S. flags flying along the Yalu River." Adds Bolton, "China can do it the easier way or the harder way: It's their choice. Time is growing short." If under such a scenario U.S. forces end up on China's border, suggests Bolton, they wouldn't be leaving anytime soon. Don't be so sure. In 1950, the last time American forces were on the Yalu River, they weren't there very long when hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers crossed into Korea. Keep in mind that happened when China didn't have nuclear weapons but the U.S. did.