Concur.
While I believe that containment needs to be retired as the centerpiece to US foreign policy, it certainly has a place for specific situations that are real, containable and tied to US national interests. North Korea is a containable problem.
As to deterrence, that needs to focus on the few big things we absolutely will not stand for (major missile attacks on Japan, Invasion of South Korea, etc) and can actually do something about. Small things can and will happen and are not a failure of deterrence. Internal actions will occur that we do not like but that are outside of any duty or right of ours to influence. Overreacting in response to the small things within the larger red lines is not particularly productive; nor is the implementation of measures that punish the populace while giving the government a great IO opportunity to shift blame for all their failures onto implementer of those measures.
There may be opportunities from such incidents. There is no reason why China, Russia, the US, Japan and South Korea cannot come up with clear red lines that all can agree upon in regards to North Korean deterrence, and perhaps this gets people to sit down and sort it out.
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