Word: weakens
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Defeat and humiliation in Lebanon will be a staggering blow for the Palestinians. It will weaken P.L.O. arguments for a place at any peace conference between the Arabs and Israel. Beyond that, when the shooting finally fades in Lebanon, the Palestinians may be forced as part of the peace to find a new base. Whether or not this would curb the P.L.O.'s troublemaking potential is unclear. But the Palestinians could, as they did after Black September, vent their rage and frustration by reverting to full-scale "revolutionary terrorism," meaning the Entebbe skyjack on a much broader basis...
...dispatches from London on the American situation, backed up by reports from a French agent in Philadelphia, argued that French aid could be decisive for the colonial cause-and yet not force a war between France and Britain. "It is the English, Sire, whom you need to humiliate and weaken," Beaumarchais wrote to Louis last winter, "if you do not wish to be humiliated and weakened yourself on every occasion." Without French help, he warned, the Americans might give up their fight and join with the British to take away France's rich sugar islands in the West Indies...
...recently, a grim joke among international moneymen was that British bankers were preparing a special Bicentennial gift for the U.S.: a pound worth $ 1.776. Two weeks ago, the laughter grew thin; sterling fell to $1.705, down from $2.02 as recently as March. The pound's collapse threatened to weaken the international monetary system and cast a shadow over the industrial world's quickening recovery. Then last week a spate of good news buoyed the pound. Its value climbed to $1.771 at week's end, raising hopes that the worst of the sterling crisis might be over...
...such a move is improbable: it would irritate voters by reducing their ability to buy foreign goods and add to European dissension. More important, such a move would anger Germany's trading partners. Anyway, it might not succeed: in these days of free exchange markets, whenever a currency weakens, speculators sell it and buy Swiss francs or deutsche marks. So Germany will probably keep on struggling with the paradox of a money so strong that it threatens to weaken the economy...
...would a PCI triumph represent an extension of Soviet domination into Western Europe; in fact, by legitimating diversity within European Communism, it would increase the ability of Eastern European countries to explore alternative socialist models to that of the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, continued American intransigence will only weaken the PCI's ability to maintain its distance from Moscow by undermining its contention that there is a "third way" between East and West. American policy makers should abandon their cold war vision of a monolithic international Communist movement, and resolutely refrain from interfering with Italian moves toward the historic compromise...