Word: brinkmanship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most famous remarks of superpower brinkmanship, Dean Rusk remarked, as Soviet ships steamed home from Cuba with the rockets on their decks, "We're eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked." In negotiating the understanding that ended the crisis, Andrei Gromyko's deputy, Vasily Kuznetsov, said sternly to his American counterpart, John McCloy, "You Americans will never be able to do this to us again." It was largely the humiliation of that episode that impelled the Soviet Union to undertake its 20-year buildup, of which the SS-20 program is one of the most troublesome...
Delors' threat now seems hypothetical in a world increasinglycolored by European economic interdependence. The question follows: Why the pluck, the French brinkmanship? German displeasure with France's economic direction had been the initial bone of contention. France's 1982 trade deficit with the German Republic--some $5.5 billion dollars--caused more than a little irritation on the German with side and spurred a late March demand that the French clean up their act. That demand was enough to get the French goat. A third devaluation of the franc in 17 months, as called for, could only embarass the Mitterrand government...
...university was first motivated by a perceived discrepancy between what middle-class, educated parents had taught their children about American society and what young people actually encountered when they began reading newspapers and travelling the country. Students discovered racism instead of equality; systematic poverty instead of opportunity; Cold War brinkmanship instead of magnanimous world leadership. Only the most circumspect and thoughtful of the early activists were able to preserve their justifiable discontent in its original form. Most either drifted away from the student movement after repeated failures or joined the rush toward destructive pseudo-revolutionary militarism inspired by Vietnam...
Carson provides nightly exhibitions of almost unrivaled technical skills, little seminars in comedy and verbal brinkmanship that can be both tutorials for the trade and, for the paying customers, a standard against which other stand-up comedy is measured. In Johnny Goes Home, Carson is shown doing something else uncharacteristic: losing his grip. Dangling from a railroad bridge as a freight rumbles above him, his arms give out and he tumbles into the water close beneath. Walking ashore, he laughs and says, "If I'd waited another five seconds I would have made it." Historians of comedy, take note...
...approve it. He aggressively directed every logistical detail of it. And, in the end, Ariel ("Arik") Sharon, 54, will reap the rewards, or the blame, for the success or failure of the enterprise. The stakes were high: Sharon hopes to become Prime Minister of Israel one day. But brinkmanship has always been his game. As one veteran Israeli politician observed last week, "He may just pull it off. If he does, it will make him a hero...