Word: awkward
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...somehow), and his accent is funny. When he pulls out a couple of Federal Reserve notes to pay for his ticket, his money looks dodgy. Is such stuff legal tender in San Francisco? Doubtful. But the friendly "base ballists," as they call themselves, accept him without a lot of awkward questions and give him a berth to sleep in. When he wakes up, he stays on the train, not knowing what else to do. He learns that they are headed for New York, where the Red Stockings plan to play a series of games...
Then there was another awkward feature of the operation: maybe it was a just cause, but it was hardly a fair fight. The ratio of the U.S.'s population to Panama's is 100 to 1. Factor in the overwhelming superiority of the American military, and it might as well be 1,000 to 1. Similar odds prevailed during Ronald Reagan's conquest of Grenada in 1983 and his eleven-minutes-over-Libya bombing raid against Muammar Gaddafi in 1986. A none-too-edifying pattern is emerging in the late 20th century. Since conflicts between nuclear-armed big boys...
...ceremony was rich with symbolism, but the circumstances were awkward, to say the least. Shortly after U.S. troops began to move, a new government was inaugurated with the aim of restoring democracy in Panama. The swearing-in took place at Fort Clayton, a U.S. military base, with only a few Panamanians present. After the new President, Guillermo Endara, and his two Vice Presidents, Guillermo Ford and Ricardo Arias Calderon, took their oath of office, they remained at the base for 36 hours...
...Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 35-member body that includes the two superpowers, has met periodically since it produced the 1975 Helsinki agreement, which ratified postwar borders and set minimum human-rights standards. But a single country's veto blocks decisions there, making it an awkward vehicle for asserting U.S. leadership in Europe. The European Community, on its part, cannot accept the U.S. as a member. That leaves NATO, where the U.S. has long been first among equals, as the heavy lifter in Baker's refurbished Atlantic house. By encouraging the alliance to become the main forum...
...with the border Vopos tossing flowers and grinning like Father Christmas, the Berlin Wall has suddenly lost the cachet it once had for spy writers. For Le Carre the timing of the Wall's decline as a cold war symbol is only slightly awkward. His latest novel, The Russia House, fails, unsurprisingly, to anticipate the collapse of the East bloc, but it does deal credibly with the slipperiness of glasnost and the refusal of U.S. hard-liners to embrace perestroika. Deighton, on the other hand, is caught embarrassingly short. Spy Line, his new novel, puts him five books into...