Something had to give. After years of Seoul doing little more than helplessly watching North Korean tyrants testing their nuclear weapons and missiles, which Kim Jong Un hopes to someday use to cow South Korea and the United States into accepting his goals for the peninsula, the allies finally made a decision to toss up the status quo.

Despite two years of debating, teasing, and dithering regarding the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in Korea, Seoul and Washington finally agreed to deploy the missile defense system on July 8. And on July 13, it was announced that a single THAAD battery would be deployed in Seongju, which is about 180 miles south of Seoul. Though judging from the rhetoric, one might be forgiven to assume that the South Korean government decided to pepper the entire country with THAAD batteries.