Word: chimera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wagon or on a binge. The fashionable and optimistic belief that humans can reap nature's bounty in a controlled fashion -- an ideal known as "sustainable use" that has long been the prevailing philosophy of conservationists as well as many businessmen -- is turning out to be a chimera...
...TANGLED EQUATION OF BALKAN POLITICS, neutrality is a chimera. That was the first painful lesson of the U.S. airdrop of food and medical supplies over Bosnia, an effort widely touted as nonmilitary in intent and, by offering help to all, evenhanded in scope. In night after night of high-altitude cargo clearing missions, U.S. C-130 aircraft parachuted tons of goods to the republic's warring multiethnic residents. But the rain of relief had unpleasant consequences. Not only did it make sniper targets out of many who ventured out to retrieve it, but it may also have helped provide cover...
World communism was a chimera even before Kennedy sent U.S. advisers to Vietnam. The Sino-Soviet split began in 1960; later, Mao Zedong refused to let the Soviets send arms to Hanoi by rail across China. In 1978 Vietnam attacked the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the following year beat back an invasion by China. This was not the sequence of events that Dwight Eisenhower had in mind in 1954 when he propounded the domino theory, the rationale for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. Instead, the violent feuding among the region's Marxist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s...
...cloth that comprises this narrative: Ginny draws together all these loose ends and is the catalyst for the consolidation of this story. Leimbach flavors her narrative with an assortment of literary devices, from sarcasm to poignance, from intensity to romantic love from irony to rhetoric and from imagery to chimera...
Like generations of Americans before them, Washington's leaders are getting it wrong about China. In the beginning, the chimera of a vast market of hundreds of millions of consumers sent Yankee traders sailing to the China coast in the 18th century, though then as now, the Chinese masses had no money to spend on imported goods. As late as 1900, the U.S. sold only $15 million worth of goods a year to China; today the U.S. buys far more ($15.2 billion in 1990) than it sells ($4.8 billion...