Word: defeatism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hermes has the power to force Quinta to respond or to destroy it, but such a victory would constitute a defeat. One crew member tells the captain, "Whatever you do -- if you do not retreat -- will result in a fiasco." ( The captain has grown increasingly pessimistic: "Any detailed study of an alien technology was futile. Its fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror, would not yield a coherent picture; they were the indistinct result, only, of the thing that had shattered...
...casual talk subsides, their businessmen-husbands complain about endless problems. Because hard currency is difficult to obtain, they have trouble buying raw materials abroad. The biggest war concern in Tehran is , the uncertain role of the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the region. Iranians are confident they can defeat Iraq but worry about the two superpowers. Iran's worst nightmare is that the Soviet Union and the U.S. will combine to stave off any Iraqi defeat. Said one Western diplomat: "The two superpowers are telling Iran it can't win the war. Their presence here has become a sort...
...lead to the "denuclearization" of Europe or the "decoupling" of the U.S. from its security commitments to the Continent. These are avowedly the objectives of Soviet policy. We are not going to accede to them. But it is not necessary to abandon the quest for nuclear arms cuts to defeat these Soviet aims...
...long as our policy remains the same, the contras are the bearers of the expressed national will. When they fail, as military strategists confidently expect them ultimately to do, we will have no choices other than to rescue them or suffer humiliating defeat in an area only a short drive, as President Reagan likes to say, from Harlingen, Texas. We'll be in big trouble with our little war. This time college students won't be exempt. Proximity, along with the spread of the war itself to Central American neighbors, will require universal mobilization...
NATO commanders claimed that their new weapons strengthened the alliance's strategic doctrine of "flexible response," which calls for the use of INF and battlefield nuclear arms if NATO armies are threatened with defeat by superior East bloc conventional forces. Allied governments welcomed the U.S. missiles as clear symbols of America's continued commitment to Europe's defense. Nevertheless, NATO stuck to its original offer: if the Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe were ever removed, the new NATO missiles would...