Word: undercutting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hour meeting of the National Security Council, President Nixon rejected Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's proposal for a 10% reduction in the 300,000-man U.S. force in Europe. The President's reasoning: the drawdown would unhinge Western European confidence in the U.S., debilitate NATO and undercut West Germany's attempts to normalize relations with the East bloc by rendering Western Europe too weak militarily to strike equitable bargains with the Communists...
...problem of doing a "classic." The audience brings to a classic work of literature preconceptions about its meaning that a director who wishes us to see the work in a new light must overcome. Too often directors have chosen cheap devices to make a work "relevant" that undercut the universality of appeal that makes a work a classic in the first place. Thus, if a director chooses to make Hamlet an alienated student radical, the audience becomes aware of the trick and the subtleties of Hamlet's character are lost in the shuffle. Hamlet becomes only a student radical...
...VIETNAM may have marked the end of America's love affair with the free world and, even more decisively, with the notion of collective defense and mutual security. The current isolationist-internationalist debate threatens to undercut Presidential activism. Vietnam has shaken the tenacity of even Nixon's anti-Communist ideology. He is somewhere between believing in the essential rightness of the war and recognizing that American interest requires its liquidation. His effort to scale down the war may seem imperceptible-indeed he still clings to the rhetoric of intervention and to the paranoid concern for national prestige-but that only...
...PROFESSOR Samuel P. Huntington so incisively put it in July 1968, the NLF is "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist." He thus described a situation in Vietnam where "the Maoist-inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution." And the prognostication has come to be mostly true. In August 1968, the Americans controlled an area containing roughly half the population of South Vietnam. Now, due in large part to a forced migration whose extent is perhaps unparalleled in recent history, the Allies have gained firm...
...does it all matter? Because, Winick explains, until people have acquired what psychiatrists call sexual identity, and until they recognize the reality of their sex, they cannot accept or cope with other realities. Says Winick: "America's survival potential may be substantially undercut if unisex continues because it will impair our ability to adapt to new situations...