Stop us if you’ve heard this one before. The Kim regime in North Korea has threatened the US with an “unimaginable strike” if … oh, you have heard this one before? Carry on:

An angry North Korea is lashing out again, issuing a new threat of military action against the U.S. The country’s state-run media said Thursday that Americans should expect an “unimaginable strike” at an unexpected time.

The warning comes just two days after a North Korean official said “a nuclear war may break out any moment.” …

In its latest threat, North Korea called the U.S. and South Korea war mongers who could cause a nuclear war. The threat comes, however, during what appears to be a lull in the North’s missile tests; it has now been more than a month since they launched a rocket.

But Tracy says North Korea is clearly very upset about the joint military exercises that the U.S. and South Korean navies are currently conducting in waters off the peninsula.

These days, we can expect a threat from Pyongyang on days ending in a ‘y.’ The catalyst du jour are the joint military exercises we’ve conducted with Seoul in response to the nuclear tests and missile launches from the Kim regime, which answered previous joint military exercises, which were prompted by previous missile launches and nuclear tests, etc etc etc. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, then the Korean Peninsula region qualifies as the most reliably crazy area in the world.

That’s not to say that the threats have no effect. According to a new poll from NBC News and Survey Monkey,  a majority of Americans now consider North Korea the greatest imminent threat to the US. In fact, there is now no partisan difference in that threat assessment:

A majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, view North Korea as the most immediate threat to the United States, according to a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll.

The majority opinion represents a shift since July, when 41 percent of Americans said North Korea was the greatest immediate threat and 28 percent cited ISIS.

But now, Americans across party lines agree that North Korea poses the most significant threat. A majority of Republicans (53 percent) and Republican-leaners, independents (53 percent) and Democrats and Democratic-leaners (55 percent) agree.

However, the diplomatic option has gained slightly over the same period, with the percentage of respondents preferring jaw-jaw to war-war going from 59/35 to 64/32. The difference is outside the margin of error (± 2.0% in a sample of 5,047 adults), but not by much. The partisan differences emerge when it comes to assessing Donald Trump’s handling of the issue:

Overall, Trump gets a 40/56, but among independents it’s 34/64. Both Republicans and Democrats in the poll appear all but married to their ideological assessments of Trump on this issue, which makes their ratings difficult to take seriously.

If the status quo reflects the popular definition of insanity and people want more diplomacy, what comes next for Trump? Maybe a Hail Mary attempt at direct bilateral negotiations, which is what Pyongyang has long demanded and what Russia and China are pushing as well? Perhaps, but the Kim regime now says that they won’t bother until they have a missile that can reach Washington DC. By that time, the game might be over in a series of unimaginable strikes, and it might very well not be confined to the Korean Peninsula and North America.