Word: retreater
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...limits to personal diplomacy. (Something politicians often have difficulty recognizing: "Lord," said Senator William Borah after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, "if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.") Personal diplomacy cannot reverse the trajectory of a great power. Russia's retreat is an aftershock of the December elections in which the totalitarian parties campaigning against reform and for empire won about half the vote...
...another perils-of-Boris power struggle, this time between President Yeltsin and conservative Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin over the makeup of the new Cabinet, Chernomyrdin effectively won. Or at least Yeltsin beat a tactical retreat. The government's famous young reform ministers were mostly dumped or demoted. In their place arrived a group of Soviet-era leftovers, production managers from the old military-industrial complex who favor salary increases and handouts to money-losing state industries. "The period of market romanticism has ended for us," Chernomyrdin crowed. "We must make our people's life easier...
...Russian political and economic transformation would run unhindered to success. The experts unanimously predicted ups and downs, and they are still doing so. "I don't think all is lost -- far from it," says a U.S. official in Washington. "There are going to be periods of advance and retreat." The long-term prospects for reform, says former CIA director Robert Gates, "remain pretty much as they have been: iffy...
...thousands of years. During long, frigid winters and short, cool summers, snow piled up much faster than it could melt, and mile-thick sheets of ice gradually covered much of the planet's land surface. After 100,000 years or so, scientists believed, the glaciers made a dignified retreat, stayed put for about 10,000 years and then began to grow again...
There is a growing understanding as well that ice ages are not uniformly icy, nor interglacial periods unchangingly warm. About 40,000 years ago, for example, right in the middle of the last Ice Age, the world warmed briefly, forcing glaciers to retreat. And while the current interglacial period has been stably temperate, the previous one, according to at least one study, was evidently interrupted by frigid spells lasting hundreds of years. If that period was more typical than the present one, humanity's invention of agriculture, and thus civilization, may have been possible only because of a highly unusual...