North Korea will become a nuclear power and there is "not much" the U.S. can do about it, according to former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden.
"Our options are pretty limited," Hayden told CNN's "New Day" program when asked about North Korea's work on nuclear weapons.
"I think the Trump administration is now beginning to realize that there are problems out there without real solutions. They're conditions to be managed, and his predecessors didn't have to be weak or unintelligent for this problem to continue. For Kim Jong Un, I think this is an inevitable logic for the survival of the North Korean regime."
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said Sunday after North Korea's latest missile test that "the time for talk is over," pointing out that the country "is already subject to numerous Security Council resolutions that they violate with impunity," and suggesting that the problem won't be solved with a diplomatic solution.
"Problem is she makes herself and the U.N. process irrelevant if she says there's nothing we can do here," John Delury, a Chinese-Korean relations expert from Seoul's Yonsei University, told CNN.
"Then we stop listening to her and the U.N. becomes totally [pointless]."
President Donald Trump expressed his own disappointment with China on Twitter Sunday.
"They know what they have to do, and I think this course is set," Hayden said. "We can moderate it, we can slow it, perhaps we can even cap it, but these guys are going to be a nuclear power."
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