Word: meant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe...
Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan--each in a different way--responded by downsizing containment. Nixon opened up to China, which essentially meant the U.S. was no longer trying to contain the Soviets alone. Carter told Americans not to panic every time leftists overran some banana republic. Even Reagan, although he funded anticommunist guerrillas, refused to send U.S. troops to battle communist rebels and regimes in Central America...
...done it before. America won World War II and the Cold War not by taking on all the enemies of freedom at once but by shrewdly isolating our greatest enemies, even though that meant cutting deals with some pretty nasty guys. We beat Hitler by allying with Stalin, and we beat Moscow in part by allying with Beijing. Today we need to beat al-Qaeda with the help of Iran, elements of the Taliban, perhaps Syria and maybe one day even Hizballah and Hamas. We need to isolate the violent jihadists who want to attack America rather than isolate ourselves...
...Nkunda - initially formed in 2003 to fight the remnant Hutu genocidaires - advanced to within sight of the main eastern city of Goma and threatened to take the country. With the U.N.'s 17,000 soldiers outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer size and difficulty of the terrain it was meant to police - Congo is as big as Western Europe, without the roads - and the poorly paid and ill-disciplined national army disintegrating, little seemed to stand in Nkunda's way. That sounded alarm bells around the world. As well as displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Nkunda's forces...
...apparently has told Vladimir Putin. Last month the Russian government announced an increase in tariffs on imported cars, sparking angry protests from motorists. The move is meant to support a local car industry that temporarily shuttered factories because of withering demand. "Now that our producers are forced to slash production, I think it is absolutely unacceptable to spend money on acquiring [imported] foreign cars," Putin said. In Indonesia, the government is slapping import restrictions on about 500 items. Importers will require licenses and can only bring in the goods through specified ports. The decree announcing the measures said they were...