Word: statesmen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...good historian must realize that the "What if . . .?" game is indeed just that -- a game. Statesmen must be judged by what they did, not by what they might have done. By this measure, Kennedy comes out well in Newman's reckoning. He was not deceived by the falsely optimistic reports on + Vietnam. Despite Pentagon pressure, he did not send in combat troops. And one of his last acts was ordering the withdrawal of a significant number of advisers. Newman has done a good job of making this record clearer; he would have done even better had he left...
...were dissidents under the old regime; others were minions of Moscow who embraced nationalism only when it was expedient. When the abortive coup in August accelerated the disintegration of the union, sovereignty went from a slogan to a realistic, negotiable objective. Provincial politicians looked in the mirror and saw statesmen and strategists. They started having second thoughts about whether sending local Soviet missile crews packing was a good idea after all. Nuclear storage facilities and launch sites suddenly looked less like imperial outposts and more like valuable assets that might come in handy as the republics bargain with the Kremlin...
Beyond fine-tuning the balance of terror, Bush's proposal was intended to help him get a grip on a more general political problem: the difficulty that statesmen have in keeping up with events, particularly in a period of seismic changes in the geopolitical landscape. Bush opened his speech with the image of the world facing a "fresh page of history before yesterday's ink has even dried." He might have been speaking about the ink on two documents in particular...
...fact they often weren't terribly useful. So the two sides would go back to the one subject where they could accomplish something -- arms control -- and the exercise became increasingly esoteric and rarefied. Like medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the statesmen would % dicker over how many warheads would be allowed on a Soviet ICBM and how many cruise missiles would be allowed on an American bomber. Nuclear diplomacy also became more controversial because it involved cooperation and compromise with a feared and hated enemy. For example, the political opposition to SALT...
...come under question. French policy toward the Arab countries, supposedly an example of Paris' understanding approach to Third World aspirations, sank practically without a trace in the quicksand of the gulf crisis. Says Gilles Martinet, an ex-ambassador with close links to the Socialists: "For most of our statesmen, whether they belonged to the left or the right, France was always strong, feared, respected, admired and envied -- until the gulf war taught us otherwise...