Word: sharp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Holbrooke's style offers a sharp contrast to Lake's. America's toughest diplomatic tactician, he is alternately ingratiating and bullying on the surface but strategically minded beneath. The former U.N. ambassador, who three years after his 1992 disappointment badgered and cajoled the warring parties in Bosnia into a peace deal few had thought possible, has the more finely tuned short-range political ear of the two. In a late-December conference call following former Pakistani Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto's assassination, some Clinton policy aides argued for a soft line on President Pervez Musharraf. Holbrooke countered that Clinton should...
...foreign aid to win back goodwill around the globe. "You've got a split in a tribe of like-minded people," says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution. But if Democrats have none of the deep ideological divisions that have plagued Republicans since before Gerald Ford, there are sharp character differences between the two candidates that would define a presidency...
...sharp contrast to NATO's Riga summit in 2006. "The tone of the discussion is a lot lighter now than it was two years ago," says a NATO official. "Then the whole thing appeared to hang by a thread." In the Latvian capital, tensions ran high over the inequitable commitments of NATO members to military operations in Afghanistan - what the countries with sizable troop deployments in dangerous areas refer to as "burden sharing." Those tensions remain, but a commitment by France to send up to 1,000 troops to eastern Afghanistan, made before this summit and confirmed on Thursday...
...sharp contrast of old and new Belfast raised one overriding question: Did Northern Ireland's Catholics get anything they wanted? Northern Ireland, after all, still belongs to the Queen. I asked a former IRA car bomber. "We got absolutely nothing," Marion said. "We were betrayed...
...Will the father move in with them? Will he tell his daughter that he has a new lover? Lahiri (who won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies) gives us nearly 60 pages of precisely narrated time and delicate emotional tension before the story finally gathers its energies for one sharp, perfectly aimed stab of achy sadness and hope. This is the short story as Hemingway practiced it--or Chekhov, for that matter--in all its demanding, reactionary glory...