Is the US on the verge of war with North Korea?

While the situation in the Far East may not match the daily newsflashes from the Middle East in terms of human beings killed or maimed in armed conflict, were war to break out between the US and North Korea the effects would be catastrophic.

Where the posturing of the secretive totalitarian regime is concerned, the world has certainly been here before. Political commentators have noted these moments of tension are cyclical. Although a ceasefire in 1953 ended hostilities between North and South Korea after a three-year war, no peace treaty was ever signed. This has meant Pyongyang regularly rattles sabres, its outward-facing belligerence often seen as a distraction for its beleaguered population (during the 1990s a widespread famine resulted in the deaths of upwards of 3.5 million North Koreans.) The North has used more traditional 'cold war' scare tactics in the past, broadcasting encrypted messages - purportedly to its agents on the other side of the 38th Parallel - although that ceased in 2000 after a historic summit between the two divided nations. These transmissions have resumed. The more worrying factor of the current face-off between Pyongyang and Washington is the arrival on the world stage of Donald Trump, a president as self-centred and egotistical as Kim Jong Un, and who relishes being in the international spotlight. Unlike the previous US leader Barack Obama, who exercised restraint in the face of North Korea's hyperbole, Trump is far more willing to match paranoid threats with his own rhetoric.

There is certainly no hint the US would pursue another policy of regime change after the chaos in Iraq and Libya. On this occasion its enemies have much bigger weapons, albeit that their missile tests sometimes seem more of a nuisance to Korean fishermen than anything for South Korea or Japan to worry about.

We have no way of knowing the extent to which Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are bluffing or being deadly serious. And let's hope we never get to find out.