Word: bismarckians
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Kennan retired from the foreign service 50 years ago to perch at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study as America's most venerated foreign policy intellectual. Although he retained the moral streak of a Presbyterian elder, it was balanced by a Bismarckian realism. With a clarity of mind to the end, he issued warnings about the dangers of the ideological passions and crusading hubris that he saw infecting America's foreign policy today. --By Walter Isaacson
...economics and political science at Cairo University, observes, "When the big powers are in agreement, the U.N. performs. When they aren't, the U.N. is paralyzed." Security Council members, who ensure that no Secretary-General will pose a challenge to their individual authority, could invest the office with Bismarckian clout at any time. Short of that, they could put a quietus to the outmoded system of rotating the chief's job among "nonaligned" parts of the world...
...Bonn's rhetoric as grandstanding, a ploy to extend German influence in Eastern Europe. The French, meanwhile, seemed "torn between their desires and what makes sense," as a senior Italian diplomat put it. Francois Mitterrand dearly wants a distinct West European "defense identity," but the French President has a Bismarckian distaste for the Balkans. "These countries," he fairly snorted two weeks ago, "have been at the origin of several great wars into which we were then dragged...
...sounds like the debate is indeed up for discussion inside Germany. Kohl's Bismarckian reference to a "German nation" shows that at least one West German is already convinced...
...pages mirror my unsettled feeling. On one hand, we can read warnings from academics, hard-line Cold Warriors and eternal pessimists about how the demise of polarity could take us back to a Bismarckian Europe. But much more common, at least until the dust settles, are the jubilations over the domino theory in reverse. Every-where we're reminded what an exciting time it is to be alive...