Word: senior
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when he met her for the first time, Obama, a former law professor, engaged Sotomayor in a lengthy discussion about the court and the Constitution. "What the President told us," an Obama senior adviser said later, "was that he was very struck by her discussion of her approach to judging, how effective she has been in working with her colleagues on the Second Circuit, including colleagues appointed by Republican Presidents, and how her judicial craftsmanship and precision in the law can be effective in bridging ideological differences and producing consensus opinions...
...Gates seems uncomfortable talking about military intellectual stuff like counterinsurgency doctrine. He insists that logic, not doctrine, has driven everything he has done as Secretary of Defense. The highest priority was supporting the troops. "He resourced the important bureaucratic knife fights," said one senior Army officer. "He sided with us on MRAPs [mine-resistant vehicles] and unmanned drones, and increased intelligence, and more helicopters. Those should have been no-brainers, but it had been a real struggle to fund them before Gates." A military intelligence officer who was an Iraq specialist told me he had been pleading for more resources...
...summer of 2006, in the immediate aftermath of North Korea's unexpected long-range missile launch, the Chinese government quietly sent a senior envoy, former foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan, to Pyongyang to express Beijing's displeasure. Tang cooled his heels for a couple of days, before finally meeting - briefly, diplomatic sources have said - with leader Kim Jong Il. Just three months later, in October 2006, North Korea again defied the world and tested a nuclear bomb for the first time...
...begin to understand the situation, the outside world should start by ignoring the standard cliché from the two governments that they are "as close as lips and teeth." Over the years, says Bruce Klingner, a senior analyst at Washington's Heritage Foundation and a former deputy chief for Korea in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, the agency's analysis section, "the talk in both capitals about the other has often been pretty scathing." Even during the Cold War, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, would routinely play the Soviet Union and China off each other...
...with Washington, Tokyo and Seoul - has been more willing to accommodate those nations' concerns. But the other, probably more powerful influence in Beijing is the international department of the Chinese Communist Party, which tends to be pro- Pyongyang. Those two factions often struggle to influence the decisions of the senior leadership in Beijing - whose "red lines" when it comes to Pyongyang seem to be a "constantly moving target," as John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under Bush, puts...