Word: vietnams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this criteria it falls short of expectations. The article on the recent history of the United States' relationship with China, a topic about which countless books and papers have been written, condenses this immense subject into 20 pages. Any one of the other essays--involving the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iraq, and Cuba--are also much more complex than can be expressed in such a small space...
...quintessential image of World War II was the flag raising at Iwo Jima. For Vietnam, it was a helicopter scrambling off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon. Apocalypse Then: the chaotic endgame of the Vietnam War fatally charged the atmosphere of the 1970s, a decade in which America discovered limits to its power and wealth. For a nation long accustomed to expansion--material, geographic and psychological--this was something new and unwelcome. Only the Great Depression--an apt name--had presented a comparable challenge to national optimism, and that was followed by the reassuring wartime victory and postwar boom...
...short, in the '70s America down-sized its expectations. Out with Pax Americana. In with the Vietnam Syndrome. Out with the Cadillac. In with the Toyota. But first, out with the President, via Watergate: nearly two years spent sifting through the rubble of Richard Nixon. Whatever hopes of a clean start were raised by Gerald Ford collapsed under the Nixon pardon and an economic crisis as impervious to Ford's WHIP INFLATION NOW buttons as it had been to Nixon's wage-and-price controls...
...1990s, however, have indeed been a period when the great arguments about how society should be organized seemed settled. Democracy blossomed in South Africa and Russia; even Vietnam embraced capitalism. Nevertheless, life has not been boring. If the melodrama of history has been subdued, the melodrama of technology burns bright. We still live in interesting times...
...resources in a major land war in Asia. That prospect may seem less pleasing today. Where the Communists almost had victory within their grasp last spring, the U.S. now bars the way and stands ready to repel any other attempted aggression. Unless Peking and Hanoi withdraw from South Vietnam--and lose face throughout Asia--it is the Communists themselves who risk being bogged in wars that they can neither afford nor end. Their blunder came as no surprise." --Jan. 7, 1966, from Man of the Year profile of General William Westmoreland...