If the President of the United States was now someone else, the level of tension would be the same. The only thing that distinguishes the factor of trump – he's got a narrower space to maneuver. For two reasons: first, given the domestic political issues, trump is forced to demonstrate that he was "cool American President" and not "Putin's puppet", which of course, affects the nature of its decisions; the second is people who consider themselves American intellectual elite, denied Trump support, and because of this, his circle of experts is composed of people of, shall we say, rather strange. Become President of any other man, and he (or she) would have been in the same situation of choosing the lesser of two evils, when to fight and not to solve, and to agree at least to some North Korean adoption requirements is simply impossible.
Now for the arguments "for" and "against" a potential conflict. It is possible to note that for the conflict are not so much military, how many policies. On the contrary, the military, especially the retired, in fact openly oppose military solution to the problem, pointing to the inevitable subsequently unacceptable damage; the factor of capabilities of the DPRK to attack the continent until the brackets was imposed, even without that, the war threatened to be very unpleasant. Moreover, the approach to analysis is the problem – muddy the information space, therefore the image of North Korea in the eyes of U.S. planners is very different from the real image, and is a risk to make wrong conclusions based on incorrect input data.
This can be illustrated by a simple example: if you seriously believe that North Korea is such a classic "state of evil" from the comics, then you can deal with it by methods from the same comic: to kill the tyrant and to scatter leaflets explaining to the people the benefits of democracy, and then immediately happens the Maidan color revolution, democracy and universal seasonable. But if you understand that you are dealing with let odious, but a stable regime, with a high level of loyalty to the leader, with a relatively functioning economy, a strong army, before the war – think thrice.