WASHINGTON—The cartoon on the cover of this week’s Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, captures the prevailing public mood. It depicts Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un as shouting babies in diapers, teetering on an atomic bomb. The mercurial new president of the United States and the belligerent leader of North Korea are engaged in a war of words. These exchanges, and their respective personalities, have stoked international fears of an imminent shooting war. Yet three U.S. experts on North Korea say not much has changed between the Obama era and the Trump era. The widespread perception that there is a dramatically elevated possibility of imminent conflict, they said, is not supported by the facts. “Wildly overblown,” said William Brown, a Georgetown University adjunct professor who worked on Korean issues for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and the Commerce Department. “There’s an incredible amount of hype here.” “This particular crisis is just like — an outbreak of madness. There’s no reason for it,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “As the scope of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions start to come into focus for people, I think there’s a kind of panic setting in.”“Last week was just a perfect storm of mindless speculation and people trying to get ahead of a story that just wasn’t there,” said Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University. “None of this stuff is new. Nothing from the U.S. and nothing from North Korea.” North Korea last week threatened a “super-mighty” pre-emptive strike that would reduce the U.S. “to ashes.” But it has issued nearly identical threats for years, said Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea scholar at the conservative ...
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