The heads of both states have taken part in a number of vicious exchanges trading insults over the course of 2017

Trump branded his counterpart “short and fat”, and the Korean leader called the US President an “old lunatic”.

However, now a number of experts have spoken out and admitted that the US President’s comments were an “embarrassment”.

Mark Fitzpatrick, Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “The North Koreans are world-class champions at rhetoric. Why enter a competition in which they can't be beat?

“Warnings and insults must be part of a greater strategy, not fired off on impulse.”

Robert Einhorn, an expert in nuclear de-escalation and arms control at the Brookings Institution, said: “Trump’s bombast was not just an embarrassment and a blow to the U.S. reputation for skilful diplomacy.

“More disturbing, it reinforced Kim’s determination to keep his nuclear weapons and may have increased the risk that the North could misinterpret U.S. military exercises as the prelude to a regime-threatening attack and decide that it has nothing to lose by striking first.”

The abusive comments were made on the backdrop of Pyongyang's nuclear expansion as the hermit state conducted a number of ballistic missile tests and threaten to attack the US.

Trump has countered missile tests from the hermit state by making a series of threats.

In August he wrote on Twitter: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong-un will find another path.”

He then warned that Kim Jong-un was a “rocket man on a suicide mission” at the UN, and while addressing the South Korean parliament in November told the rogue state to “not underestimate” the US, warning that the “three largest aircraft carriers in the world are appropriately positioned”.

Continuing his condemnation of the Republican, Mr Fitzpatrick said Trump’s comments "may have pleased his base" but "made no sense" otherwise.

He added: “The danger, of course, is that such insults can easily be misread by an already paranoid North Korean regime.”

Trump has also previously publicly warned his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with little rocket man”.

Kim Jong-un has called the US leader a “dotard”.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Eric C. Anderson, who served as an intelligence officer in South Korea and was a senior analyst on North Korea, has said that his President lost the war onwards because he appeared to take the communist state too seriously.

He described it as “sad” that Trump was able to be “manipulated from any foreign shore” and said North Korea would consider the US’s attention as a victory.