What if you don't have a good option in front of you?

You stand in a moment when you recognize the requirement to respond, but without a good road to ride out on.

Some council what's been called "strategic patience." A few years back, that was the magic word combination when it came to dealings with North Korea. At many levels of government, when it came to North Korea, at some point you'd hear someone utter "our policy is strategic patience."

There's good reason to give that phrase a side-eye. It suggests a simple play-for-time, a hope and a prayer and a wish that the problem will go away over time.

But I'll stick up for the approach. It is, in part, a play-for-time. It is a hope that the environmental circumstances that gave rise to the problem will move along. It is to calculate that a bad environment will shift in the same way a bad storm eventually subsides. That's not unrealistic at all, considering the constancy of change in our lives.

The adversary may also change. The inside baseball, the bad-guy machinery in front of you—something may bend the way the adversary approaches the world, and in turn, your ongoing competition with them.