Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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HONG KONG -- Deng Xiaoping, China's senior leader, may be too senile to govern. According to a Western diplomatic source, the 88-year-old head of state has lost all real decision-making ability, and now Deng's family members -- some of whom had taken advantage of the authority vacuum -- stand to lose power. Members of the top leadership are distancing themselves from Deng's children, and a corrupt Deng retainer was recently stripped of his immunity from prosecution by the man who may someday officially become Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin...
Once again, the post-cold war era is turning out to be more complicated than anyone expected as the West searches for ways to stop nuclear proliferation. There is no obvious answer, and the Western dithering that has accompanied the rape of Bosnia does not inspire confidence that the international community will come up with a strong plan of action soon. The U.S. is juggling competing objectives that undercut its own commitment to non-proliferation -- the desire to improve relations with China or to secure Syria's cooperation in the Mideast peace talks -- and so far, Washington has not figured...
Though the Security Council could authorize military means to disarm or punish Pyongyang, any attempt to use force would be extremely tricky. Bombing a functioning nuclear facility could produce an instant Chernobyl and, probably, retaliation. "We might try to take out their nuclear capability with a scalpel," says a Western analyst in Seoul, "but they would respond with a chain...
Treaties also ban chemical and biological weapons but at least 18 countries stockpile either or both. An agreement among major supplying countries, most of them Western, limits the sale of ballistic missile systems. There are no enforcement provisions and North Korea pays no attention to it, while China promised Washington to obey the rules but continues to break them...
Such old-fashioned politicking, quietly replayed across a belt of carefully chosen Western and Midwestern cities and towns this spring, finally caught up last week with Clinton's new-fashioned energy tax. The well-organized lobbying buried the $72 billion BTU levy that was the centerpiece of the President's deficit-reduction plan. A chastened Clinton pulled back from the bruising fight and left the Senate Finance Committee to wrangle over a replacement plan that included some combination of a gasoline tax and cuts in Medicare. The negotiations will be tense as the committee struggles to meet its deadline this...