As long as the US Empire can be funded and maintained on the backs of its taxpaying public, the chance of de-escalation of tensions not only on the Korean peninsula, but throughout the world are practically nil.  And, as long as the nation's current interventionist ideology holds sway, it will only be through a financial meltdown that the US's role as global policeman will come to a much-needed end.

The most recent example of the world's biggest bully escalating matters is its on-again, off-again badgering of North Korea.  In contrast to Western/CIA media reports, the November 28 launch of what appears to be an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-15, was not unprovoked.  Instead, the North Korean test firing was in response to the unexpected announcement of further US/South Korean military drills to take place starting on December 4.  The exercises are, in part, to show off the latest mass murdering "product" of America's military industrial complex, the USF-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet.

Before the latest launch, the Kim Jong Un regime had not fired a missile for two months and was in discussions with other intermediaries about how tensions could be lessened on the Korean peninsula. For the bellicose US, however, not even an uneasy "truce" can be tolerated.  The next American scheduled drill was not to take place until the spring of 2018, yet, while negotiations were taking place, the US abruptly, and to the outrage of everyone involved, renewed exercises.  Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, explains:

Buy Gold at Discounted Prices

We have been working with Pyongyang.  Then,
all of a sudden two weeks after the United States
had sent us the signal [about readiness to dialogue],
they announced unscheduled drills in December.
there is an impression that they were deliberately
provoking [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un to
make him break the pause and gave in to their
provocations.*

This, of course, is not the first time that the US has acted with duplicity in foreign matters.  Its barbaric dealing with two Middle Eastern strongmen (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi) are grisly examples of what happens to those who run afoul of the US Empire, especially those who do not possesses a nuclear deterrent.

North Korea, too, has witnessed the wanton destructive capabilities of the American military during the so called "police action" of the early 1950s:

The US Air Force estimated that North Korea's
destruction was proportionally greater than that
of Japan's in the Second World War. . . .   American
planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea . . .
including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to
503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific
theatre of WWII.**

The loss of life was, to say the least, catastrophic as 10% of the population, some 3 million people, perished due mostly to American bombing while the destruction of property was equally brutal.  "By the end of the war," North Korean sources assert, "only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang."***