Team up with whom?
Let's think about where people's interests lie.
First and foremost, the North Korean establishment (the government, the KWP and the Army). Above all, stability is their watchword. Anything that might destabilize the country could, in turn, lead to their ouster. For all their bluster about Chosun hanada, no one with any power in the North actually wants reunification, because they know what happened to East Germany. Taking a few potshots at a South Korean island or a South Korean ship is one thing--invasion across the DMZ is suicide--and they know it.
Secondly, her neighbors. The PRC is all that is keeping the country functioning at the moment, because she is their sole source of petroleum. But the PRC makes far more money from her trade relationship with the South, and a rogue state lying next to one of China's major trading partners is not in China's interests. Russia is on friendly terms, but only to the extent that it serves Russia's foreign policy interests with respect to Japan and pacific trade. Rason is an ice-free port with good access to the Northern Pacific and provides a cheaper option than expanding capacity at Vladivostok.
Third, her trading partners. Even if a deal for oil could be struck with Iran, North Korea does not have the hard currency with which to purchase the product, nor the refinery capacity. There's absolutely no point in having tanks if you don't have diesel to put into the engines.
But there is one threat in which North Korea can be complicit, and that's the Middle East. Iran is far behind North Korea in nuclear weapon's technology, and is a ready market for North Korean expertise. We know what North Korea's nuclear capabilities are. She has plenty of uranium in the ground, and she has enrichment capability sufficient for either low enrichment reactor purposes, or for high enrichment bomb purposes. After her two tests, she probably has enough highly enriched Uranium for five or six devices, but no capability of delivering them (they're Uranium devices, so they are big, bulky and not particularly aerodynamic unless you drop them from a bomber). With a low enrichment reactor, she also has a source of plutonium. What she does not have is the ability to create a plutonium device--yet.
So, what's a viable foreign policy approach? Since she has uranium supplies of her own, the capacity to refine it and the ability to weaponize it, then why pretend that this can be stopped? What can, and should be, stopped is the sale of this supply and technology into other hands. If relations with North Korea are normalized, trading relationships established to give her access to food, petroleum and export markets, then perhaps there will be some incentive for the administration to "join the club," and keep her weapons technology for herself, and to content herself with the nuclear weapons that she has now, rather than building newer technology.
So here's where sensible foreign policy and good politics divide. The "Axis of Evil" is good politics--but it's stupid foreign policy. The United States need to find a way to climb down, and accept the things that she cannot change in order to prevent things that she does not want to happen.
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--James