Word: client
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Several strands of policy, many of them interwoven, would be tested on my trip to Moscow. But overshadowing them all, when the time came for departure, was the offensive launched on March 30 by the North Vietnamese army. Could the Soviet Union be induced to pressure its client for the sake of the summit? Or were we ourselves in danger of being manipulated by the Soviet Union so that we would hesitate in responding militarily to North Viet Nam's challenges...
...Soviet Union has its client dictators too. Rather than just tolerating leftist tyrannies, the Kremlin justifies them with dogma and defends them with tanks. Those that call themselves socialist and persecute in the name of the proletariat often seem more enduring than ideologically reactionary, avowedly anti-Communist dictatorships. Most of their staying power is due to the Soviet tanks, ready to roll over incipient democratization as they did in Prague in 1968. Political geography also helps leftist totalitarianism. It has been most durable in Eastern Europe, wedged snugly within the postwar Soviet sphere of influence, though even in that bloc...
...spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses...
Aside from quarreling over who "lost" Iran and Nicaragua, many in the Carter Administration would agree with Kissinger that there are great risks in pulling the rug out from under a longtime client without a plausible, acceptable successor well positioned to take over. "It's an unhappy fact of life," observes a White House policymaker, "that destabilizing our friends is a hell of a lot easier than destabilizing our enemies, and undoing a friendly regime that we have lost patience with is a lot easier than putting it back together again." So some of the men around John...
...large part of the challenge is to distinguish between viable authoritarian regimes and ones that are doomed, especially among those the U.S. relies on to protect regional security. Where is the status quo best sustained, and where is it a lost cause? When should the U.S. stand by a client, despite his internal regime, and when should the U.S. begin to distance itself from him? In the context of statecraft, these questions are neither moralistic nor cynical. They are a matter of differentiating between those with whom the U.S. must live and those who will try to cling...