Naturally, people are inclined toward instincts of survival and preservation. There are other ways to view our ultimate end, but for the purpose of this column, it is useful to acknowledge the fact that, deep down, humans tend to strive for preservation. With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to North Korea, primarily its leader Kim Jong-un, and make the claim that he may not be as insane as the majority of Americans say he is. No, I am not defending him, but maybe we can paint him in a different light that would help us understand why we are in this war of words.

Since 1948, the Kim dynasty (also referred to as the Mount Paektu Bloodline) has seen the dominant force in the West intervene with rulers such as Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. While the majority of the regimes the U.S. has intervened with have been quite recent, the Kim dynasty was still built upon a fear of democracy and progression. Keeping and consolidating power is the ultimate end for the Kim dynasty. However, fear is the important concept here, because operating out of fear leads to irrational decisions.

Now, contrast that with a leader whose actions can be interpreted as always acting in accordance with a fear of losing power, with a leader fearful for the longevity of his power in Donald Trump. If we are primed to act for our own preservation, but are reacting to fear, then as stated before, irrational decisions will follow. And, with the entirety of world diplomacy at the mercy of one man’s Twitter feed, it is not wholly implausible to see a global conflict, whether involving nuclear weapons or not, come into existence. But this will not be the case.

The root of every news headline we see involving the U.S. and North Korea is fear. Each government is not fearful of each other, but fearful of losing its governance and power over the people they rule. This explains the escalation of verbal threats between these two states. Each government sees the other as an opportunity to show how strong they can be. A recipe like this is a disastrous one, and people will be affected. But again, I do not see any further conflict between the U.S. and North Korea escalating above the sanction phase. We can calm down and relax about full scale nuclear war for now, but we do need to remember that fear will lead to irrational decisions. If we have two states operating in accordance with fear, naturally there may be irrational decisions as a result.