Many of us realists see Pyongyang's resort to warlike noises now as its US election season version of a half-century-old policy of alternating threats with cajolery – a policy that's always been targeted at getting Washington to withdraw American troops from South Korea.

In 2024, the short-term goal likely would be to reestablish Kim's hand-holding relationship with Donald Trump, in hopes the former president will win reelection and once again will consider troop withdrawal .

Without seeing the backs of the American GIs, who deter invasion by acting as a human tripwire, the Kims are unlikely ever to achieve the founding grandfather's goal of controlling South Korea.

The other faction of Pyongyang watchers – which we may call The Sky is Falling – is forever urging us to work harder at understanding what's in the Kims' heads. The assumption is that the Kims can and do change and we can make a deal with them – or suffer grave consequences for failing to do so.

The authors of the scare piece anticipate that realists in and out of government will respond with“the by-now routine argument that Kim Jong Un would not dare take such a step” as starting a war,“because he knows Washington and Seoul would destroy his regime if he does so.

“If this is what policymakers are thinking,” they write,” it is the result of a fundamental misreading of Kim's view of history and a grievous failure of imagination that could be leading (on both Kim's and Washington's parts) to a disaster.”

Understanding the mind of the ruling Kim is a worthy goal indeed, gentlemen. But how much time did you spend with the current Kimster as you explored his view of history? We'd been told that the basketball star Dennis Rodman was the only American who became Kim's drinking buddy .

In the article, you don't relay any telling conversations with Kim. Instead, you cite some particularly bombastic language he and his regime have used publicly lately.

As South Korean scholar Moon Chung-in told a Seoul newspaper , you are

Thomas Schäfer, who served twice as Germany's ambassador to North Korea, has dismantled the Carlin-Hecker argument in a rebuttal published by the same think tank that posted it originally. Schäfer writes that, basically,

That would be an understandable objective in view of what Trump said about Kim at a West Virginia rally in October 2018:“I was really being tough. And so was he. And we'd go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they're great letters. We fell in love.”

Bradley K Martin first traveled to North Korea in 1979 as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Currently associate editor of Asia Times , he is the author of a prizewinning history, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty , as well as a novel set in North Korea during the Kim Jong Un era, Nuclear Blues .

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