Word: third world
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WHICH, of course, rules out blaming God and leaves only Mother Nature and us. with more on the way every second. The world's population, especially in underdeveloped Third World countries, is growing exponentially. It reached 4 billion just a few years ago and is expected by scientists to hit 5 billion right around the turn of the century. It took thousands of years before the world population could even approach 1 billion...
...environmental problems are especially complex because they are caused by substances that are necessary to fuel the economies of industrialized nations and warm Third World families. Cleaning up a polluted river or a waste dump is often a mammoth task, but it requires that a community decide it is worth the cost and effort. Stemming the destruction of the earth's atmosphere, on the other hand, will require a national and international effort to change the way that economies run and lives are lived...
This will come as news to Poles and Czechs and East Germans. But grant that outside Eastern Europe, in the Third World, the Soviets are indeed falling back. Why is that happening? Conventional wisdom has it that Gorbachev needs to rebuild his economy and restructure his society. He cannot do that while expending energy, treasure and occasional blood in foreign adventures. Internal retrenchment requires external calm. He needs a respite: a stable international arena and good relations with the U.S. Hence the cold war, like other old thinking, must...
...this light, the Soviet pullback in the Third World is an autonomous Soviet decision, the first fruit of Gorbachev's "new thinking." The problem with this theory is that it overlooks one fact. In this sense it is very much like the common explanation of Gorbachev's acquiescence to American terms for the INF treaty. Did Gorbachev withdraw his SS-20s from Europe because of a change in ideology? Because he wanted to turn his attention to domestic tasks? In fact, he withdrew because he met resistance that he could not overcome. The U.S. responded...
Another recent elaboration in the press of the conventional wisdom puts it this way: "In the heyday of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union tried hard to promote Communism in the Third World . . . Now, under what might be called the Gorbachev Doctrine, the Kremlin has adopted a more cautious stance, backing away from confrontation." Why? Because "the Kremlin has been disappointed by the inability of Third World Marxists to impose stable Communist systems on underdeveloped societies...