April May be alright.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

That's the spirit.

So spare me; here we have Donald Trump, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, the four horsemen of the apocalypse threatening to lead us into Armageddon and all of them claiming to have the moral high ground. As if bombing Syria wasn't chest-beating enough, President Trump has now sent the Nimitz-class carrier USS Carl Vinson to the Korean Peninsula as some kind of warning to Kim Jong-un. It was from the deck of the Carl Vinson, you may remember, that Osama bin Laden's body was famously dumped at sea following his death at the hands of U.S. special forces in 2011. Sending the Carl Vinson to North Korea will doubtless be a subtle reminder that the U.S. doesn't especially like despots, not that Trump will have left anyone, least of all Kim Jong-un in any doubt about the status of their friendship. The all-too real possibility that Trump has a mind to bomb North Korea's missile launching facilities and/or nuclear test sites as he did Syria's air base is a very worrying escalation of the current troubles.

I get that Donald Trump is a man of action: after all he attained the presidency on a platform of bold and ambitious promises to act where others had sat on their hands and refused to initiate any drastic reforms. He clearly had a mind to show the world that the Bond villain Vladimir Putin and the economic thuggery of China would no longer be tolerated by a Trump presidency, and I understand why some might think that is commendable. But setting fire to your neighbour's cat as a warning when they're being particularly unpleasant is not only cruel to the cat, it's just a tad inadvisable if the neighbour's best friend and business partner is the local Mafia mob boss who also just happens to have a few tactical nuclear weapons stashed out the back somewhere.

In the game of How High Are My Morals?, al-Assad, Putin, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump are not exactly your likely finalists battling it out for the Karma Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for the trophy cabinet. That three of the four have nuclear weapons and the fourth is (apparently) substituting chemical weapons to compensate for his lack of a nuclear arsenal, whilst China also sits there calmly reminding everyone that they too have a gigantic array of nuclear winter options available to them, rather suggests that world peace and the contented humming of global harmony is not going to be gently singing us to sleep anytime soon. In fact I think about the only option left to us might be to buy in a crate of Polmos Spirytus Rekltykiowany over-proof vodka and drink ourselves to a merciful oblivion before a less-anaesthetized version of oblivion rains down on us from above.

So as the USS Carl Vinson steams toward Korea with its crew of 6,000, its cruise missiles and some 90 aircraft, doubtless Kim Jong-un is considering his options, while the rest of the world looks on in horror and possibly also, like me, considers boosting the coffers of Polish vodka producers. There seems to be very few other options available to us.

The optimist in me says this will be simply a case of sabre-rattling and that things will quieten down in a few days. But then I look at the global stage and realise we've not seen a bunch of extremists like Trump, Putin, Jong-un and al-Assad facing off like this before, at least certainly not in the nuclear age. With Trump feeling forced to act, it's not even a Mexican standoff and you can almost see Trump in cinematic slow motion, having broken the impasse and now reaching for his gun. What happens next will be intense. I just hope someone, somewhere is smart enough to broker some kind of peace deal or at least a workable compromise before these turkeys do something we will all regret.