It is tempting to explain America's mixed messaging towards North Korea as the old "good cop, bad cop" routine. If only it were that simple. Or rather, that complicated.
Instead, the world awaits the reactions of two men in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, whose hair styles are way-too-interesting, and their behaviour no less adventurous.
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We will support Japan: Bishop
After North Korea launched a missile that broke up over Japan, Foreign minister Julie Bishop says Australia is ready back Japan at any time.
Modest pelts such as Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, provide some comfort to a nervous world as they act to curb Donald Trump's freewheeling bravado.
But who's in charge in the end? How can an anxious international community bank on co-ordinated pressure to resolve this if the US itself cannot manage one voice?
This is not some peripheral argument over resource rights or market access, this is "launch code" serious for thousands, if not millions of people.
Nothing we've learned about the horn-blowing Trump in his first seven months points to anything other than a boastful novice, wilfully misinformed, and determined to stay that way.
A few weeks back, it was his nuclear threat to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen".
On Wednesday night it was a tweet declaring the next phase would not involve words.
"Talking is not the answer", he decreed.
Yet both Tillerson and Mattis say diplomacy remains the great hope. It is a flat contradiction, but one most would welcome.
Australia's position is in this camp also. In recent days, Malcolm Turnbull has nuanced what had been a pretty blunt and unproductive pitch to China.
This calls for China to step up the economic pain on Kim Jong-un's renegade regime, while acknowledging that Beijing does not have direct control, that the DPRK is not its client state.
Despite some preposterous raving from China's The Global Times newspaper, Turnbull's diplomacy here is about avoiding military misadventure on the Korean Peninsula. It is actually calibrated to be less about blame, and more about animating China's strategic self-interest through its economic "leverage" over Pyongyang.
Turnbull's oil reference has ruffled feathers in Beijing but it aims to remind China that its long-term strategic security will be better served by retaining a functioning buffer-state between its south-eastern border and a US-aligned South Korea.
And it's a coded message to Trump too that ultimately, this is China's problem to fix despite Washington's bizarre like-for-like bellicosity.