While Kim Jong Un enjoys setting off explosions, he prefers not to get hurt. He’ll shoot people, yes, and tiresome relatives are high on his to-kill list, but he likes to pace himself. Thermonuclear war is too much, too soon. This is a man who wants to see many more days of roller-coaster rides, basketball games, and executions.

Donald Trump, despite his impulses, also prefers not to get hurt. He initially tried peaceful approaches to the nuclear-bomb issue, first leaning on China and then calling Kim a “smart cookie.” Only in August did he try to match the crazy, promising “fire and fury” if Kim tried anything funny, and even that was undermined by Trump’s own team. Rule of thumb: Never go full NoKo.

Despite a shared desire to avoid a hot war, though, Kim or Trump could still miscalculate, striking first to prevent the other guy from striking first, for instance. So let’s pray we live. Meanwhile, as we wait, let’s retrace our steps a little. If there’s any lesson worth learning from the Korean crisis, apart from the precise location of Guam, it’s this: when it comes to policymaking, especially the foreign variety, gut must yield to head. Otherwise, you get capricious decisions and even bigger humanitarian problems.

If we go back in time, we’ll see that much of today’s crisis is the fruit of yesterday’s dumb feelings. When Bill Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, North Korea was nearly contained. A deal had been reached to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors in exchange for shutting down their plutonium reactor. Unfortunately, this disgusted Washington’s hawks, and they did their best to undermine it. Only an amoral egghead, went the sentiment, would stoop to cut a deal with a malevolent tyrant. Once Bush took office, the heart got to point the way. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” explained Vice President Dick Cheney. “We defeat it.”

Well, that worked out well. Going with gut revulsion toward North Korea’s tyranny regime led Pyongyang to tear up the deal and get back to its bomb-making ways. By the time Bush handed off the problem, North Korea was well on the way to being untouchable.

Then came Barack Obama, who looked at all his options. Failure might have been an unavoidable result, but what made it inevitable, at least after 2011, was yet another moment when sentiment pushed reason out of the car and grabbed the wheel. That was when Libyans started to protest the tyranny of their leader, Muammar Qaddafi, in February 2011. The protesters had grounds for complaint, especially since Qaddafi’s response was to promise to kill them all. But did it mean the United States should intervene?

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Yes, came the consensus reply. Decent people couldn’t stand by while mass killing unfolded. Reluctance to use force, of the sort Obama was showing, was “a disgrace,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic. Familiar names like Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot were among the many signatories to a letter urging Obama to take action “for the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility.” So did Samantha Power and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So did former Clinton employee and Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, with a New York Times op-ed headlined “Fiddling While Libya Burns.” This wasn’t her title, but it summed up the zeitgeist of the moment. Eventually, Obama relented and took out Qaddafi by force.