The pointlessness of patty-cake - today's edition

Here's how impressed Kim Jong-Un is with talk of beautiful letters:

North Korea has miniaturised nuclear warheads and made them small enough to fit on ballistic missiles, Japan believes. 

Tokyo defence chiefs warn in a new white paper that North Korea's military activities pose a 'serious and imminent threat'. 

In last year's report Japan said it was 'possible' that North Korea had achieved miniaturisation, but Tokyo now appears to have upgraded its assessment, according to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri. 

Japan is seen as a 'primary target' of nearby North Korea's weapons capabilities and fears that Pyongyang's nuclear programme is 'growing unabated', experts say. 

The latest findings come alongside newly-released pictures which suggest a North Korean plant may be leaking hazardous waste into a nearby river. 

The Japanese report highlights the lack of progress on denuclearisation talks, said Vipin Narang, a nuclear affairs expert at MIT. 

'It is Japan that is most threatened, and probably the primary target of such a capability,' he said. 

'So openly acknowledging it underscores Tokyo's acute fears that North Korea's nuclear program continues to grow unabated with no foreseeable plan to slow its growth, let alone eliminate them.' 

Rogue regimes should not be legitimized, and they clearly don't fall for the clumsy attempts at charm on the part of the Very Stable Genius.

And the charm initiative is one part of his overall foreign policy incoherence.

Or, as Hal Brands of the Johns Hopkins Schools of Advanced International Studies and the American Enterprise puts it:

The price of sloppiness tends to increase in a crisis, moreover, and the Trump administration is now facing several actual or potential crises simultaneously: An increasingly fraught trade conflict with China; a potentially explosive showdown between Beijing and pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong; rising tensions between India and Pakistan; and the still-dangerous state of affairs vis-à-vis Iran, among others.

This is precisely the situation in which a global superpower needs a shrewdly calculating president and a systematic approach to foreign policy. Unfortunately, the U.S. is lacking on both counts.

Quite so.