Word: shorn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Saddam Hussein remains in power, at least for the moment, shorn of the military might that made him a menace but not of all capacity for troublemaking. Containing him may require not only a long-lasting arms embargo but also some sort of regional security scheme. Kuwait is liberated, but a smoldering wreck needing perhaps years of reconstruction. Then come the broader difficulties: trying to forge a stable regional balance of power -- or balance of weakness, as some commentators suggest -- and defuse the hatreds that have made the Middle East the world's most prolific breeding ground for war. French...
Wilson's constricting mechanical direction produces not human characters with which we can emphasize, but shorn ideas, naked philosophical statements flung at the audience in dramatic, but cold and unemotional fashion. The staging subsumes the performances of the actors, rendering them irrelevant...
Today what seems more striking than the almost quaint idealism and the bombastic style (forgive me, Harry) is the degree to which, shorn of rhetoric, the essay proved to be a realistic program, anticipating the Marshall Plan, Truman's Point Four call for American technical assistance abroad, the Kennedy Peace Corps, Food for Peace. America as a powerhouse of democratic ideals, as the champion of freedom and the source of material sustenance and technical expertise -- all animated U.S. foreign policy the past half-century...
...empire that were never integrated into Russia and that are now gravitating toward the West or to the Muslim world may eventually leave. But the rest of the country will not suffer a mortal blow as a result. In fact, quite the contrary: the revival of a Russia shorn of the least compatible remnants of its imperial legacy may encourage the development of a new federation whose diversity is, once again, a source of strength rather than weakness...
...assume, second, that the Soviet threat cannot be succeeded by a Russian threat. A Russia shorn of empire and taken over by embittered nationalists could easily revert to the kind of dangerous revanchism that seized other defeated powers in this century, notably interwar Germany...