From Friday’s “All-Stars.”

On U.S. plans to intercept the North Korean vessel suspected of carrying illicit weapons:

Look, what’s puzzling here is not the behavior of the Chinese, but of the United States. The Defense Department said, as we heard in an earlier report, said this is a delicate situation with the interception, that nobody wants confrontation.
Well, if you’re going to stop the ship at sea, that is the definition of a confrontation.
And if the Chinese have said that the U.N. resolution doesn’t authorize the use of force, and we don’t think that we are going to do that, why are we intercepting? We are going to ask if we can board. They are going to say no. We’ll say please, and they’ll repeat no. And then what?
If we’re not going to use force, which I think we should not–we are not in a position to go to war right now–then we ought not to engage in any of this, because it’s going to be a humiliation. It’s going to look as if the resolution is toothless, which it is, but [that] America also is toothless.
I’d rather let it go without a sham confrontation in which we back down, than have this confrontation, and be embarrassed and look very weak.