Word: expansionist
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...Roman emperor Hadrian ascended to power in A.D. 117, he inherited a state in crisis. Trajan, his predecessor, had stretched the Roman Empire to its furthest reaches through aggressive military campaigns, sparking rebellions from Britain to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Once installed as ruler, Hadrian reversed the expansionist trend and withdrew troops from what is now Iraq. Thorsten Opper, a curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, says Hadrian realized then what coalition forces realize now: that it's easier to control territory through a friendly, well-functioning government than through occupation...
Earlier the month, the U.S. Navy reported that five Iranian speedboats had approached a U.S. convoy in the Strait of Hormuz and radioed the threat "You will explode." President Bush promptly warned that an expansionist, fundamentalist Iran was up to its old tricks and that "all options are on the table to protect our assets." For a moment, the stage was set for confrontation. There was one problem: Pentagon officials noticed the recording was suspect and had to move quickly away from their initial claim that Iranian naval officers had issued the threat...
Relations between white and red men were the most variable factor in Jamestown's early history. The western Chesapeake was ruled by Wahunsonacock, chief of the Powhatan. He was an expansionist, no less than the English, having brought 30 local tribes under his sway, an empire of 15,000 people. In December 1607, Smith described his royal state: "He sat covered with a great robe, made of raccoon skins, and all the tails hanging by," flanked by "two rows of men, and behind them as many women, with all their heads and shoulders painted red." The settlers hoped to make...
...Sunni regimes of the Middle East, fearing that their traditional dominance of the Arab world is being challenged by an expansionist Shi'ite Iran in coordination with allies such as Syria, Hizballah and Hamas, have rallied to support Siniora's embattled government, underlining the sense that there is more at stake than a parochial tussle over power sharing in Lebanon...
...bloody anti-American insurgency in the Philippines, one that dragged on through Roosevelt's presidency, for the most part he did not live to see the lethal predicaments a global power can face. We can't know what he might have thought about Vietnam, much less Iraq. His expansionist impulse had its idealistic side; he too talked about spreading democracy. And you could see its legacy in developments after his death, like the Marshall Plan. But every time the U.S. contrived to overthrow an elected leader abroad who proved resistant to U.S. aims, some of Teddy's legacy was also...