It seems unlikely that North Korea will continue to press its aggression on its neighbour - given the pressure from both China, and America, to do otherwise. However, it is an erratic, fragile and attention-seeking state, and anything could happen. If war does break out, then it would be potentially a trigger for a "third world war" - precisely the reason why China, a rather cool and moderate customer on the world stage, all things considered, would not let that happen. Still, yet another reason why nuclear weapons in the wrong, infantile, hands, can be a bad thing. In any hands. The Republican urge to sink recent arms reduction treaties for short-term gain, in the light of rogue proliferations, appears ever more craven.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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Try living in Taiwan, or talking to someone who does (like me) who is well aware that China has 1000+ missiles pointed at it. China is currently manipulating the world into believe it is a peaceful riser when in fact it is nothing but.