Cutting a promo is not a declaration of war

I get the feeling by now that the President enjoys trolling Kim Jong Un. He's living out many Americans' fantasy of sticking it to everyone, including obnoxious foreign rulers, from the privileged position of "the most powerful man in the world." He probably feels like he scored some great coup when he recently provoked Kim to issue an unprecedented first-person statement in response to the previous Trumpian threat against himself and North Korea. Things haven't gotten any better since then. The story earlier this week was that the Communist kingdom would treat another Trump threat -- a warning that Kim "won't be around much longer" -- as a declaration of war by the United States that justified the Kim Dynasty should it be found necessary to shoot down American aircraft. At this point I guess I'm supposed to lament the President's bellicose rhetoric toward the Pyongyang regime, as if it will be Trump's fault if an American plane does get shot down. While Trump's impulse to cut promos on the dictator, as they say in professional wrestling, is indeed embarrassing, if not also dangerous -- since Trump can't depend on intimidating the little madman into submission -- it won't be his fault if the Juche jabronies act on their assessment of one particular utterance. Since I'm sure Kim assumes himself Trump's intellectual superior, if not the wisest of all living men, he really has no excuse for not knowing what a real declaration of war from the U.S. looks like -- even if we haven't delivered a proper one since World War II. To be more clear about it, he shouldn't expect the rest of the world to assume that he'd be acting in self-defense if he shot at an American plane, just because he and his mouthpieces say that Trump has declared war. Worse, by his own standard his stooges' constant threats to obliterate the U.S. with nuclear missiles are just as much a declaration of war, and could be used with equal justice to rationalize a preemptive American attack on North Korea. The sad thing about this, apart from the millions of lives potentially in jeopardy, is that each antagonist seems absolutely certain that he can scarify the other into backing down, when the worst thing either can do now is assume that the other is a paper tiger. Donald Trump strikes me so far as someone who wants to be either loved or feared, with no middle ground available, and as someone eager to make a demonstration of American might as well as his own will. I don't dare delve deeper that that, but what may really decide the fate of the Korean peninsula is whether or not, all gossip and propaganda aside, Kim Jong Un really is crazy. A sane man won't take as big a chance as he is on a still largely unknown quantity -- though I suppose a merely stupid man might.