Word: sovietize
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Outside Pyongyang and a few big cities where the élite still live on government rations, the majority of North Koreans in urban centers get almost everything from officially sanctioned markets. "This is exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union in 1989," before it collapsed, says Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Academy of Korean Studies south of Seoul. "Nobody believes in the old socialist ideology anymore--they believe in money...
...confront the North Koreans in a multilateral setting, and the linchpin of that strategy is China. Bush has long believed that Beijing has the most to gain and lose on the Korean peninsula and would quietly pressure Pyongyang to give up its nuclear ambitions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Beijing has been North Korea's closest ally, funneling oil and food. China would have to absorb many refugees if Kim's regime failed...
...Tehran is simply following the strategic logic that drove the proliferation of nuclear weapons over the past half-century: The Soviet Union saw acquiring nuclear weapons as a matter of survival because the U.S. had built and used them to decisively tip the balance in a conventional conflict. France, Britain and later China acquired them because they sought strategic independence from the U.S. and the Soviets respectively. Israel built nukes as the ultimate strategic trump card in the face of the numerical strength of surrounding Arab armies; India pursued them because its prime strategic rival was not Pakistan, but nuclear...
...helped bring the Soviet Empire down,†said Sharansky. “It helped to link the question of human rights with international relations...
However, Sharansky warned that the free world quickly forgot the lesson learned in the Soviet Union. He pointed to U.S. support for Saddam Hussein and Yassir Arafat in recent decades...