It is possible to build a missile defense and defuse confrontation with Russia.
Certainly we should use our planned unilateral reduction of offensive missiles to "defuse confrontation with Russia," as Bush suggested last year.
He anticipated a knee-jerk Gore reaction with a built-in response: "It is possible to build a missile defense and defuse confrontation with Russia.
In their frequent, almost casual, references to the potential annihilation of each other's people, the two leaders are eroding a once-unspoken assumption that leaders seek to defuse confrontation, not cultivate it.
He also said it was possible to move ahead with defensive missiles and still "defuse confrontation" with Russia, even though President Vladimir V. Putin and others have ardently opposed such a shield.
Indeed, such run-ins — which can be over principles and people that are, of course, important in their own right, just not as important as the entire relationship between the powers — can often lead to better understanding and the development of ways to cooperate and defuse confrontation.
In May of 2000, candidate Bush's defense team had him suggest a way to "defuse confrontation with Russia" by coupling our withdrawal from ABM's restraints with cutting our stockpile of 7,000 nuclear missiles "to the lowest possible number consistent with our national security".
Immediately signaling both confidence in current strategies and willingness to hear other perspectives can often defuse confrontation.
The BBC's Jon Leyne in Cairo says the postponement is another sign that the government wants to defuse confrontation, but it remains to be seen whether it ends the days of angry and sometimes violent protests.
Lynch said he had his own way of defusing confrontations.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, speaking at the church after Mayor Bloomberg, said Ms. Sanz was so good at defusing confrontations that she had been given the task of training new agents.
