Word: scandalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During the two years of Watergate, many foreigners never really understood its near paralyzing grip on U.S. public attention. They assumed that the scandal was nothing much more than politics as usual. Many Europeans, for example, thought Americans were being unsophisticated, moralistic and, above all, naive to force a President to resign over what looked to them like a minor matter. The scandal now rocking Washington?involving as it does seemingly hypocritical diplomacy, arms deals and the secret funding of a guerrilla army?is much more comprehensible to the rest of the world, even if some of its features seem...
...question that dominated foreign ministries in capitals around the world last week, as the Iran-contra scandal continued to explode, was whether it would have the same kind of disabling effect on Ronald Reagan's presidency as Watergate had on Richard Nixon's. That was a matter of great concern to both friends and foes, but particularly to U.S. allies. "There is a basic given within the NATO alliance," said a French official. "This is that we rely on the solidity of the American regime." His unspoken point was that, temporarily at least, this basic stability has come into question...
Despite the atmosphere of normality in Geneva, there were signs that the Iran-contra affair could indeed affect superpower relations. Coming on top of Reagan's decision to violate the unratified SALT II arms treaty, the scandal has evidently prompted the Kremlin to allow Soviet commentators to attack Reagan personally, something that was avoided in the recent past. Georgi Arbatov, head of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, called the scandal "a truly cinematic story out of second-rate Hollywood films, in which Ronald Reagan has been featured for years...
Nowhere was the scandal played as such unabashedly good news as in Nicaragua, whose Marxist-led Sandinista government hoped it would be a major blow to the chances of continued U.S. support of the contra guerrillas. President Daniel Ortega claimed the Sandinistas had known all along that the U.S. was conducting a campaign to keep antigovernment forces supplied in defiance of congressional prohibition. The Sandinistas hope the prohibition, lifted in October after Congress voted to send $100 million in U.S. aid over the next year, will be clamped back...
Under Gorbachev, news is reported more promptly, but the ideological spin remains. When National Security Adviser John Poindexter resigned, TASS immediately carried an announcement, then added, "In this way the Administration is trying to hush up the scandal over secret U.S. arms deliveries to Iran, which were carried out on the order of the White House." In a report last week, a Soviet TV correspondent in Washington called the Iranian affair "shameless and lawless, even by American legal standards...