Raining On Kim Jong-Un's Celebration

"[The Trump administration has] entered the path of open threat and blackmail. The closer such big targets as nuclear powered aircraft carriers come, the greater would be the effect of merciless strikes."
"[The United States is] pushing the situation to the brink of war, creating a dangerous situation in which a thermo-nuclear war may break out any moment."
North Korean People's Army/North Korean Foreign Ministry

"[The White House is now] prepared to engage in activities that are different from what America has been doing these past few years."
"Several American governments had attempted to deal with the North Korean threat] putting a nuclear warhead into the United States, and we're simply closer now than we have ever been at any time in North Korea's history."
Mike Pompeo, director, CIA

"We have to understand the regime in North Korea. While they are evil, they are not crazy. They are not seeking martyrdom. They are not suicidal. I don't think they are going to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. That's bluster on their part."
"The danger is we could get into some kind of a military conflict with them and it could escalate into a nuclear war. If they are cornered and their regime is about to collapse then they might use the nuclear weapons."
William Perry, (former U.S. defence secretary)

"The North Koreans are already incredibly paranoid. This would only solidify their beliefs ... "
"It might even trigger an inadvertent war."
Richard Bitzinger,  military expert, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore

Getty Images ... The US carrier group deploying off the Korean peninsula is led by the USS Carl Vinson

Abrasively contentious, egoistically provocative, the Kim Jong-Un government of North Korea has the entire neighbourhood on tenterhooks, never knowing from one day to the next what the paranoid, pompous little dictator will order his military to display reflecting the versatility and capability of its military scientists in their ability to produce impressively technologically-advanced designs for satellites, ballistic missiles and the nuclear warheads to cap them with.

These theatrical displays come complete with dire threats directly implying that North Korea is fully prepared to make full use of its armaments should even the hint of an impending attack against its sovereign entitlement to destabilize the Korean Peninsula of East Asia be on the horizon. The Peoples Republic is prepared to go even further, given sufficient time and expertise, to be enabled to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles directly targeting the coast of the United States and anywhere else that raises Kim's warring ire.

China, its great and powerful neighbour which has up to the present, shielded North Korea from most United Nations Security Council sanctions in alarmed rebuke over the country's nuclear ambitions, is itself finally sufficiently alarmed to place a distance between itself and its unruly client state, with the final realization that it holds no grip of cautionary prudence over any decisions that emanate from Kim, furious that world powers fail to recognize his country as a power among them. He might relent should the United States apologize for antagonizing him.

But matters appear to have accelerated quite beyond that simple remedy with the ascension of a new American president, seemingly unamenable to reason. Whose persona, it seems, is as quixotic as that of Kim's, with a penchant for launching surprises and an unquenchable propensity to view war machinery and military arms as toys he can play about with at whim, powerful and threatening, serving as background to the power invested in the office of President; a Trump-Kim match-up.

The difference being that there is no individual, group or law that is capable of blocking Kim's decisions, while there are those limits on power in the Constitution of the United States of America that can, if required, be called upon to restore sanity and pull the administration back from the brink of disaster - in theory, at any rate. This is the "Day of the Sun" in North Korea, marking the 105th anniversary of the founding father's birth, Kim's sainted grandfather, Kim Il Sung. And for which day a very special event is to be unveiled which onlookers assume will be another nuclear test.

North Korea is marking the 105th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung -- Reuters

Now, in the interests of good fellowship and international diplomacy, North Korea warns that American military bases in South Korea and the South Korea presidential palace are in serious trouble, given the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers steaming toward the Korean Peninsula in an obvious show of intimidating force. The stated targets will be "pulverized within a few minutes", which more or less mirrors the U.S. military's use of its Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb in Afghanistan.

While Kim Jong-Un enjoys extending threats to others, he most definitely finds threats extended toward him and his regime insultingly infuriating. The very thought of a pre-emptive U.S. military strike where Tomahawk cruise missiles were to be dispatched to strike North Korea's nuclear test site has brought him to mouth-foaming incoherence. The Kremlin, which has had its own hands slapped recently, is watching these developments with "great concern".

Japan, another target of North Korean spleen, is nervously taking "every possible measure" in preparation for whatever contingency happens to raise its malevolent presence on the Korean Peninsula. The fact of the matter is, the world at large can no longer afford the luxury of giving  North Korea more time to keep developing the weapons its erratic ruler implies will gain it the respect long due in reflection of its importance in world affairs.

China's President Xi, having met congenially with America's President Trump, knows of a certainty that this is no vacillating mindset he crossed courtesies with. And President Xi has reason for alarm, considering the instability of the situation at present, burdened with the new realities whereby the man it may once have considered to be unstable but responsive to restraints imposed by China, is in fact impervious to restraint.

Rather, a clash which up to the present has been avoided, appears in the offing, and this concerns China as much for the flood of North Korean Refugees it envisions flooding over its border, as it does the loss of a buffer between it and the influences of the West.