Word: counterweight
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...stand wherever, in whatever country, universally for human rights." But it also has an interest in maintaining ties to regimes that occupy vital strategic positions. Never, though, has the U.S. faced that dilemma on the scale posed by today's China: the world's most populous nation, an important counterweight to the Soviet Union, until recently a force for stability in Asia and now a regime guilty of a massacre of its own people that has enraged Americans far more than anything ever done by Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines or Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea...
...asserts that "the Communist Party lost as an institution. Communists won not because they were Communists but despite being Communists." The insurgents suffered a setback in last week's election of a new parliament, or Supreme Soviet, but Gorbachev still intends that body, over time, to serve as a counterweight to the party. He is pulling off an amazing, perhaps unprecedented, feat in the history of statesmanship: he is simultaneously the leader of the entrenched power structure and the leader of the opposition...
Hispanic life also puts a different stress on the claims of individualism. The arts in America are absorbed by personal experience, the melodrama of the interior life, the spectacle of "me." Hispanic culture offers a counterweight in the claims of community and the shared impulse. You can see those asserting themselves in mainstream life through such means as the outdoor murals -- acts of public declamation in the tradition of the great Mexican muralists -- that are an essential part of the Los Angeles cityscape. Add to that sentiment the claims of family, the primal unit of Hispanic life. The Mexican poet...
...Stone's The Trial of Socrates provides an unintended counterweight to the central theses of Bloom, who fancies himself a disciple of Socrates. Stone, the legendary lefty muckraking journalist, set out in his retirement to write a sweeping tome on freedom of thought in human history. His studies inevitably drew him back to Athens. "There, like so many before me," he writes, "I fell in love with the Greeks...
...turmoil and tragedy of the period itself and the radical movement's undignified implosion in the Seventies, the Sixties left a potent political and social legacy that continues to operate in our own day, in forms such as a liberalized racial and sexual climate and a powerful social counterweight against Executive warmaking...