Word: confrontational
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beijing last Sunday, China's National People's Congress adopted an antisecession law aimed at Taiwan. The legislation, which authorizes a military attack to prevent the island from seeking independence, has heightened regional tensions and raised a question diplomats would rather not confront: Would China really pull the trigger...
...That was not, of course, Rice's only message. Wherever she went, she reiterated the Bush Administration's view that freedom and democracy are the essential underpinnings to sustained peace and prosperity. No question where that shaft was aimed. "We believe," she said, "that when China's leaders confront the need to align their political institutions with their increased economic openness, they will look around them in Asia and they will see that freedom works." Perhaps predictably, Xinhua, China's state-owned news agency, mentioned only Rice's complimentary remarks on China and did not refer to her comments...
...generalized sense that American-style democratic capitalism will never again face a serious challenge is one of the most troubling aspects of our current societal discourse. Today, the notion that America might one day have to confront a fully-formed, radical, and expansionist ideology such as Nazism or Soviet Communism is almost laughable. Yet if history has one clear lesson to offer us, it is this: New challenges will inevitably rise and blindness towards them is extremely dangerous...
...century Europe was in a situation eerily similar to ours; free trade reigned, passports were not required for travel between states, and democracy and democratic rule were everywhere ascendant. Even traditionally conservative Germany was moving in a democratic direction, as the parliament became more representative, powerful, and willing to confront the Kaiser. The most “brutally repressive” political regime of that time—Czarist Russia—was admittedly harsh, yet in over one hundred years it killed less than four thousand people...
Although both photographs seem unassuming, they force a viewer to confront familiar situations (After all, who has not been bored at a dance or struggled to get dressed?), and in so doing, to reconsider adjacent, more extreme photographs...