Word: realpolitiker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days. Yet 30 weeks after the substance was administered to Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, its potency seems undiminished, contaminating relations between two former imperial powers and pitting the demands of justice against the exigencies of realpolitik. London's request to Moscow on Tuesday to extradite Andrei Lugovoi as chief suspect in Litvinenko's murder drew a response that's increasingly familiar to Kremlin watchers: an abrupt no. There were some obvious reasons for Russian intransigence. The case is a skein of disputed plots and subplots. Lugovoi and one companion - or two, according...
...Defense chief Robert Gates represents the more Realpolitik team now taking over. He has warned Iraqi leaders that the U.S. military is not on indefinite loan to the Iraqi government and has lauded Democratic efforts to impose a timetable for troop withdrawal. Although Gates has won plaudits from Congress for his candor, he and President George W. Bush clearly need help crafting Iraq policy. That's why the White House is hunting for a "war czar." So far, half a dozen former military officers have declined the offer. Most retired officers under 62 can be ordered back to active duty...
...needs silver linings. But for Bush and Rice it may also reveal a deeper philosophical shift. In recent years the Bush team has split over whether to abandon the ambition that underpinned the invasion of Iraq--to bring Western-style democracy to the Islamic world--in favor of conventional Realpolitik, in which idealism takes a backseat to stability. The most obvious signals that the U.S. is tilting back toward realism came on Rice's trip to the Middle East last month, in which she toned down calls for democracy for the Arabs and talked up her desire to broker...
...will--is not so much in between left and right as it is outside them, impatient with both A.C.L.U. niceties and Bushian moral absolutes. This season, Bauer allies with Hamri al-Assad, a (putatively) reformed terrorist leader, to stop an attack. He thus displays a better grasp of realpolitik than has the Bush Administration, which resisted the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to work with Iran and Syria. A fellow agent asks Bauer if it matters that al-Assad has murdered hundreds of people. "I don't know what means anything anymore," he answers. "The playing field has changed...
...Realpolitik" dictated, for example, that the Soviets' downing of a Korean airliner in September 1983, killing 269 people, was not allowed to significantly interfere with business as usual. And "realpolitik" eventually paid off - at least for the West - as the Soviet Union disappeared a few years later without a shot being fired. Today, "realpolitik" has given way to "realeconomics" - who cares if Moscow bumps off its citizens in Chechnya or elsewhere as long as the oil and natural gas are flowing from Russia? The West reacts most loudly when its investments in Russia are endangered...