North Korea

How do you deal with a leader who is unstable, immoral, and incompetent?  For starters, you can do your best to keep him from being reelected in 2020.  In the meanwhile, you can hope that the people around him won't let him do anything too stupid.

As for Kim Jong-un, he certainly is immoral, but he is neither unstable nor incompetent — and even a far less competent Dear Leader would recognize that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only real guarantee of national survival given the regime-changing proclivities of the world's foremost military superpower.  Kim saw what became of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

A nuclear deterrent works only if your adversaries know you have it; hence, the bomb and missile tests, and the pictures of Kim with that rocket-ready nuclear warhead.  When American experts conceded that the threat was real, our own Dear Leader and National Id reacted predictably.  Kim countered Tr*mp's dire warnings with a specific threat against the air base on Guam, demonstrating his superiority at the freak-em-out rhetoric game.

Having lived through decades of Mutually Assured Destruction, beginning with the times I hid from atom bombs under my elementary school desk, I find it hard to take the current situation all that seriously.  Rex Tillerson has been downplaying Tr*mp's bellicose pronouncements for all he's worth, and I'd like to think that even if Tr*mp did have a psychotic break and ordered a preemptive attack, "his" generals would not comply.  (You don't think they'd have given him the real nuclear suitcase, do you?)

Over the next couple of months, the world will settle down to a nuclear-armed North Korea, China will be ignoring the economic sanctions it approved last week, and the USofA will move on to its next crisis.  We all can put our old classroom desks back in storage.