As tensions between US and North Korea ratcheted ahead of Donald Trump’s first visit to Asia, prominent news providers weighed in on the scale of the crisis.

“The escalating rhetoric of both North Korea and the US president is prone to polarise its audience, resulting in two contradictory and equally imprudent strains of reaction,” said the Guardian in an editorial. ‘The first is panic. As the Trumpian tweets and blasts of Pyongyang propaganda grow more extreme, the spectre of war coalesces in the public mind. But it is still a spectre, and the most likely outcome is that the immediate crisis will pass as the others have: without satisfactory resolution, but also without catastrophe. The Korean peninsula is unlikely to go up in flames just yet, despite the fondness of both sides for threats of fire and ashes,” the newspaper said in its assessment of the situation. However, it also warned that such relief might be premature “as the insults and missiles fly without resulting in any real-life casualties, unless one counts the egos of Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump”“These bombastic, swaggering adversaries could be straight from the pages of a satirical novel; the tendency to treat North Korea as comic relief is understandable, but profoundly wrong. There is nothing funny about the US telling a leadership with good reason to fear regime change that it “won’t be around much longer” and threatening to “totally destroy” a country it previously carpet-bombed. Nor about North Korea describing the first remark as a “declaration of war” and threatening in response to shoot down US bombers outside its airspace,” the paper said.

The New York Times zeroed in on a chilling survey of North Korea’s cyberpower, observing with alarm the “sophisticated programme of not only weapons of war but also of theft, blackmail, harassment and score-settling, is shocking, but not surprising”. Noting that Kim Jong-un was ruthless in his quest for power and survival, it said: “Hacking, even more than the nuclear power North Korea is rapidly developing, is the perfect weapon for a small, impoverished, isolated, totalitarian state. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons pose an enormous threat to the United States and its Asian allies. But even a megalomaniac like Mr Kim understands that unleashing them would spell a hellish end to him and his country. Cyberweapons, by contrast, offer a degree of stealth and deniability and a broad range of uses.” The solution to the threat was to “motivate countries where the North Koreans operate — starting with India and China — to cooperate with the Americans in combating this threat,” the paper said.

Commenting on the crisis, the Korea Times said: “Pros and cons are being discussed in Washington as to whether US President Donald Trump should visit the Demilitarised Zone [DMZ], the forefront for the inter-Korean standoff since the 1950-53 Korean War, during his forthcoming visit to South Korea. True, Trump’s visit may provoke the North at a time when he has been engaged in a war of words with Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong-un over the latter’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and missile systems. But there is more to lose from Trump’s ‘no-go.’” The North may think Trump is following his predecessors and moderates with his tough talk, which would strengthen the North’s hand in pivotal negotiations that might prevent it from completing its nuclear misadventure and, if they fails, to freeze its arsenal on a strict set of terms.

The Korean Herald meanwhile predicted that Trump was most likely to focus on pressuring North Korea with international sanctions, and said: “One lingering concern is that such a hardline stance of the Trump administration could conflict with [South Korean] President Moon Jae-in’s position, as despite all the rhetoric for pursuing both sanctions and dialogue, he prefers engagement with the North, as did his liberal predecessors Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Moo-hyun.”