Those latter traits, however, harbor a most dangerous vulnerability to outside provocations - foreign and domestic - which in turn could unleash furious, reckless, impulsive lashing out by Trump himself.
Assad's government has repeatedly denied using its chemical arsenal, calling the Aug. 21 attack outside Damascus a provocation by rebels intended to persuade the international community to intervene.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Kiev on Tuesday to show "strong support for Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and the right of the Ukrainian people to determine their own future, without outside interference or provocation", the State Department said in a statement.
"Whatever the provocation from outside the area, it is overwhelmingly local people who have damaged their own community and its future".
A number of Thomas Heatherwick's Spun chairs, symmetrical and circular in shape, sit outside his new exhibition Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studios, currently at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum.
The provocation proved provocative.
David Usupashvili, the speaker of Parliament, described it to reporters outside as "another spectacle and provocation of Saakashvili, which the protesters unfortunately succumbed to," the Interfax news agency reported.
The experiences of eyewitnesses, including Peace Corps volunteers and resident missionaries, suggest that the events in Kwangju represented an indigenous, immediate response to military and police violence, rather than a planned provocation manipulated by outside political forces.
It also suggests that hotheads may indeed react faster to provocations from the outside than the rest of us.
Duterte had indicated he would not continue "colluding with outside meddlers and making unnecessary provocations", the state-run agency added, in a not-so-subtle dig at US opposition to Beijing's activities in the South China Sea.
