Ron DeSantis would authorize preemptive strike against North Korea given ‘evidentiary threshold’

Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’d take a hard line against North Korea if necessary, including a preemptive military strike in the event evidence said they were gunning for the U.S. first. On Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, the Florida Governor said he would do so if “you knew that there was definitely someone was about to launch a missile at you.” “Of course, you take action to prevent and protect your people, but that would require a certain amount of evidentiary threshold,” DeSantis told Norah O’Donnell.

“I don’t think you just go willy nilly.” DeSantis also said he would keep North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, isolated diplomatically if he were President. “Well, we have to obviously keep Kim Jong Un in a box. This is a very irrational individual, he’s prone perhaps to do irrational things.

And so we will work to put him in a box and to keep the pressure on Kim Jong Un.” The discussion of keeping Kim Jong Un “in a box” comes as the North Korean leader heads to Moscow for a meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. That meeting could lead to military cooperation, with Putin potentially trading economic aid and technology for munitions to be used in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which DeSantis has downplayed as a “territorial dispute.” — The Associated Press contributed reporting.