At a time of such global confusion, it is not Brexit, Syria’s civil war, Russian assertiveness or China’s games in the South China Sea that consistently make the newspaper headlines, but the antics and brinkmanship of a state led by a man in his early thirties who is the third generation of a Communist family cult.

The U.S. needs China a great deal more than it does Russia in order to minimize the security threats from the unstable and threatening North Korean regime and to maintain regional stability in Asia.

Given the domestic pressures faced by the major players, especially the US, in the near future, we can only expect an extension of the current dilemma.

China clearly has no intention to engage in a military competition with the U.S. — Beijing has slowed down its growth rate of defense spending while Washington is trying to increase it. Increasing military spending is entirely unnecessary if the U.S. is truly strengthening military and security cooperation with all other major powers in the world.

A series of episodes in recent years – including Russia’s cyber interventions to skew the United States’ 2016 presidential election toward Donald Trump, the anonymous cyber-attacks that disrupted Ukraine’s electricity system in 2015, and the “Stuxnet” virus that destroyed a thousand Iranian centrifuges – has fueled growing concern about conflict in cyberspace.

A new crisis is brewing on the Korean Peninsula. In mid-February, North Korea conducted an intermediate-range ballistic missile test. On March 1, the United States and South Korea began a joint military exercise that is unprecedented in scale and intensity.

The nation’s military spending is lower than the world’s average, and far below the US defense budget. China has no appetite for external expansion for an arms race, but for the sake of its own safety, it should properly increase the spending on defense as the national economy grows.

Despite China’s economic slowdown, the Chinese government has plans under its "Made in China 2025" program to spend $300 billion by 2025 to become self-sufficient in critical technologies and strategic emerging industries. U.S. unease at the size and opaqueness of China’s large military buildup are well-known. The latest developments will likely lead the Trump administration to continue efforts to reduce Russian defense technology transfers to China, sustain the EU arms embargo on China, and make U.S. weapons and other U.S. exports more competitive in global markets.

Physically, THAAD serves as an Iron Curtain to intercept incoming missiles from North Korea. Separate national security interests have supplanted Cold War ideology, but THAAD could influence competing alliances and block cooperation among the countries involved in the “Six Party Talks.”

The sea issue is a stumbling block in China-US relations, but it’s not clear that the new president sees it as more important that the RMB exchange rate or other issues in the bilateral relationship. In that case, “freedom of navigation” there could be used by Trump as a bargaining chip in negotiations about issues that concern him more.