Word: grips
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...fact, much more is at stake in the crisis engendered by Marcos' fading grip: the stability of the Philippine archipelago and U.S. influence in the entire region. The Philippines is an important member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, a six-nation group* that has enjoyed surprising stability and prosperity in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam. Collapse of the Philippines in the face of a Communist insurgency would severely impair the security of the remaining ASEAN members and pose a threat to U.S. allies as far away as Australia...
Whatever the ups and downs of his health, Marcos has always insisted on keeping a patriarchal grip on the apparatus of power. An outsider who was allowed to visit a caucus of the ruling New Society Movement last year reported that the session resembled "a big meeting of all the warring tribes, in which the President was like the chief, called upon to arbitrate all of their family feuds." None of the burning national difficulties of the day, such as the Communist insurgency and the ailing economy, were discussed. Instead, local and provincial party bosses offered up their special pleading...
...dream, it lives on in the hearts of true believers. As a strategy, it died years ago. Ever since the dark days of the cold war in the early 1950s, many Americans--especially conservative Republicans--have yearned to "liberate" the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe from the grip of Communism. That the U.S. was powerless to fulfill that wish by action short of war has not stopped various Administrations from trying at least to chip away at Soviet domination of the East bloc. Secretary of State George Shultz last week became the latest U.S. statesman to try, touring a trio...
Shultz's Eastern journey had been timed to take advantage of the postsummit mood of goodwill between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In the past, East bloc countries have felt freer to deal with the West during periods of detente. But loosening the Soviet grip can be risky. Whenever East European countries have tilted too far to the West, the Soviets have forcibly jerked them back, as they did to Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland...
...culture took over a large part of the inherited content of expressionism--its obsession with the mystical, the vast, the unconsciously collective and the charismatic, and its magnification of an inbuilt weakness for kitschy spirituality into a noxious rhetoric of state power--we will not fully understand its grip on the minds of Germans...