Word: brinkmanship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That metaphor seemed inexact: no shots, after all, had yet been fired by either side. Even so, it seemed that brinkmanship, usually a negotiating tool among enemies, had become the dominant form of discourse between the U.S. and many of its important friends. The brandishing of threats and deadlines also marred U.S. trade relations with neighbors to the north and south. As the European row erupted, U.S. negotiators announced that they had solved -- almost -- a festering softwood-lumber dispute with Canada. Meanwhile, the Administration postponed for at least six months yet another major trade confrontation, this time with debt-laden...
...superpowers could get caught in what is known as an offense-defense spiral: each side proliferates offenses to penetrate the other's new or improved defenses, and adds defenses to protect itself against the other's increasingly sophisticated offenses. That is the classic formula for strategic instability and nuclear brinkmanship. For a President hoping to go down in history as a peacemaker, it would be a bitter legacy indeed...
Twenty undergraduates walked into the Kennedy School last night for a training session on nuclear brinkmanship. Today, they'll put that training...
...Brinkmanship: a strategy in which a nation displays its willingness to risk war if an adversary does not back down...
...there were deep contradictions in Kennedy's foreign policy, conflicts in which an old view of the world and an emerging view competed with each other. Part of him retained the mentality of the cold war, a kind of Dulles-like brinkmanship. At the same time, a succession of crises convinced him that a new course was necessary. At American University he declared, "What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave ... not merely peace...