At this point in time, a truculent rogue in the White House fumes at an upstart rogue in Pyongyang, both fumbling away in the kindergarten of blunder and realpolitik. The issue is to see how they measure up in the stakes of rogue behaviour.
Unfortunately, US President Donald Trump has shown, like his various predecessors, that international law, for the bomb-heavy bully, is a convenient moral reference when needed, but will be avoided like a leper when it becomes an impediment. Power, unadulterated in purity and application, will always triumph over hollow ideals and moral reminders.
One particular tic of the US, deemed by William Blum to be the rogue state par excellence, is that of regime change. Noam Chomsky has repeatedly reminded readers the US 'holds the world championship in regime change'. All this, despite the superficial assertions of sovereign equality between states in the United Nations charter.
Even conservative commentators such as Samuel Huntington, author of the 'clash of civilisation' thesis involving the West and Islam, noted in 1999 that 'while the US regularly denounces various countries as "rogue states", in the eyes of many countries, it is becoming a rogue superpower'.
The US has made the formulation and breaking of international law cardinal features of the international system. It is hard to imagine any international covenant, convention or agreement touching on state conduct in the last century that does not have some element of influence from the legal eagles of the US.
Without the bountiful US legal contribution to international institutions and jurisprudence, there would have been no crime against peace, considered in 1945 novel and dangerously eccentric by European counterparts.
The very idea of an international criminal court seized of authority to try potential war criminals was also forged in the adventurous, if overly zealous, thoughts of US lawyers keen to view international relations as a game of moral decisions with consequences.
This inventive, maze-driven homework on the moral order of the world's international engagement has always come back to stalk, not always with the necessary menace, US policy makers keen on pushing an agenda of force at the expense of the legal order they claim to maintain. He who creates can also undo and ignore.
"The indignant missile strike on Syria, in the absence of any United Nations Security Council Resolution, could hardly count in the context of a proportionate, legal response."
A few cases come to mind. The US State Department was deeply troubled when questions were asked about whether Washington was pursuing an agenda of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Vietnam, a point raised during the proceedings of the Russell War Crimes Tribunal held in Stockholm. It arose again in the matter of the Iraqi invasion of 2003 by US-led forces, with various subsequent vain efforts to hold President George W. Bush to account for international law violations.
The problem here, as it has always been, is that the eagle of law is often blinded after its enthusiasm for finding new prey. Excuses intervene; apologias mount. There are times, goes this line of thinking, when rogue states need to be punished; their ways righted by a nuclear armed policeman who knows what laws need to be policed.
To that end, it is worth noting that the latest, indignant missile strike on Syria, in the absence of any United Nations Security Council Resolution, could hardly count in the context of a proportionate, legal response. Even humanitarian advocates struggled to identify the rationale for the strike, despite its supposedly very humanitarian pretext.
The poorly named Democratic Republic of North Korea is hardly a state to be exonerated in this theatrical farce of international relations. It punishes its populace with a ruthless regime that still endorses the brutality of forced labour camps. It murders political dissidents. Like the United States, it avoids conventions and covenants it does not like.
But in its very psychic existence, troubled and terrified by the intrusive, regime altering powers of the United States, options are few and far between. A rogue state North Korea may well be, but there are always bigger rogues to contend with.
Dr Binoy Kampmark is a former Commonwealth Scholar who lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.