Word: warred
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...leading power broker. At the same time, he managed to preserve a relatively cordial relationship with Iran, which had given its blessing to Hizballah's negotiators. Iran's cooperation may have been motivated in part by the battlefield losses it has suffered recently in the eight-year-old gulf war with Iraq. Last week Iraqi troops recaptured Iranian-occupied territory east of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, beyond the battered southern port city of Basra...
Hollywood loves a gimmick -- and too often loves it to death. One year there are three movies about gallant farm women battling fate and fortune; the next it's comic-book heroes saving the world or muscle-bound hulks trying to write a different ending to the war in Viet Nam. This year's flavor is a gentle fantasy about body switching: the young and old changing places with supposedly comic results. But 18 Again!, Vice Versa and Like Father, Like Son were more frantic than comic, and it remains for Big, the last out of the gate, to show...
...that promise. Reagan showed little interest in getting to know Soviet leaders. He proposed a dubious and potentially destabilizing scheme for space-based defenses. In a speech that will be remembered long after he leaves office, he stooped to rhetorical depths not seen since the onset of the cold war, decrying the U.S.S.R. as the "focus of evil in the modern world . . . an evil empire." So what was the most conservative President of the modern age doing in the Grand Kremlin Palace, amid the zinc columns and gilt bronze chandeliers of the St. George Hall, smiling at the ruler...
...contrary Russian view, from Tolstoy through Lenin, is that history is mainly forces and factors. "In historical events great men -- so called -- are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace, "and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself." Herein lies another irony: just as Reagan's romantic view overstates the role that individuals can play in shaping history, the Russian view probably understates Gorbachev's personal potential...
...Gorbachev's chance to become the pre-eminent global figure of the late 20th century depends more on what he does at home than at summits. The cold war exists not because of a lack of understanding between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.; it exists because they understand each other all too well. Americans are fundamentally repelled by the character of the Soviet system: its repression, state control and expansionist tendencies. When Gorbachev came to power, U.S. officials insisted that a decrease in tensions would require a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a reduction of Soviet meddling in Africa and Central America...