A month after conducting some kind of nuclear-device test - it seems doubtful that it was the hydrogen bomb that North Korea claimed it was - the Hermit Kingdom has test-fired a long-range missile. Claims it was to put a satellite in space.
Are you buying that? Not even Ban Ki-moon and Secretary Global-Test are buying it.
And, frankly, at this late juncture, what is any world power in a position to do about it? Japan had made noises about shooting it down, but ultimately refrained. The nations of northeast Asia are situated in close quarters to each other. This is a fact that not only they, but post-America have to take into account. You don't need a long-range missile to send a torrent of artillery fire raining down on Seoul or Tokyo, much less to nuke them.
Have we indeed crossed irreversibly into a new era? What force in the world that is animated by some kind of righteousness and maturity and interest in a benign stability can or will now stop the most evil nations - and non-state actors - on earth from pursuing unthinkable forms of extortion or actual attack?
There are two understandings of the word "peace" that can motivate someone to utter the sentence, "We must keep striving for peace." One is a view that it's one of those periods of reprieve from the constant of war that characterizes our species' history, periods when some advancement in our knowledge and application of the material universe, as well as the refinement of a political system that accurately reflects the human condition, is possible, making life more comfortable, convenient, just and free for a while before another clash of strategic interests occurs. The other is an unfounded belief that an unprecedented permanent absence of such a clash is possible.
It is not. That's why the good guys that have emerged as the above-mentioned refinement has taken place must not abandon what they know and go chasing fantasies.
Or is the proper way to word that, "should not have abandoned what they know over the last 40 years"?
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