Australia doesn't usually need much encouragement to partner with the US in whatever righteous military conflict it deems just. We've done so in every major conflict since WWI.
Obviously some have been more justified than others.
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North Korea's Nuclear and Missile Tests
How a ceasefire signed more than six decades ago has failed to deliver stable peace and allowed nuclear tensions to escalate.
But the idiosyncratic nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un has just provided the most comprehensive justification possible for a US-led pre-emptive assault: a clearly stated threat of nuclear strike on Australia.
No government can ignore that. The question immediately becomes one of how best to forestall such a calamity. Until now, that's been a mix of diplomacy, sanctions, and implied consequences. But "strategic patience" has run its course.
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The North Korea challenge is now one the US and its allies have no choice but to address. The balance of argument now is for strategic haste.
The aggressive rogue state is posturing for the ultimate fight. Right now, it has between 10 and 20 nuclear devices and is busily developing the means to convey them. Its ambition is the nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
Pyongyang's threat of using just that on Australia is nothing less than an invitation to war. Indeed if deemed credible, it carries that obligation. Just as JFK faced a closing window in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 – with any delay being enough to get Cuba's soviet-supplied nuclear warheads fuelled and aimed at American cities – the US and its allies are being hurried to a fateful choice.
Some in Australia will counter that the North Korean bully-boy is merely bluffing. Others will question the DPRK's technical know-how, and therefore its ability to carry out its threat of a nuclear strike.
And some may even be persuaded by Pyongyang's petulant ultimatum: that Australia should separate from the US because that alliance has made us more vulnerable.
There are sound arguments for a more independent foreign policy than the approach Australia has pursued to date. But they are for another day. Confronted by a genocidal aggressor-state threatening thermo-nuclear annihilation, this would be a bizarre time to seek distance. Australia has skin in this game.
As events tumble toward what is increasingly looking like a military solution, Australia's strategic interests are inextricably linked to American military might and power.
In the absence of decisive progress by Beijing, which has allowed this situation to reach crisis point, the US may be left with no choice but to act pre-emptively. In all of our interests.