Reflecting the diminishing possibilities, a senior Clinton administration official said today that "talking about a peace deal is increasingly artificial" in the atmosphere of violence.
At the moment, the thinking is that white women, concentrated geographically in the American south, face a future of diminishing possibilities; black women can see an upward historical trend (albeit because the history of black America is so grim, in comparative terms).
In a preface, Mr Cannadine argues that all of these essays, written over a period of some 20 years, are connected by Britain's sense of "vanishing supremacies and diminishing possibilities, the feeling that things were no longer as great or as stable or as splendid as they once had been".
This allows carrying out the analysis without fastening on any existing structures and hence diminishes possibilities for path-dependent thinking.
Twenty years ago, in a short-sighted act, the U.S. government sold off much of the Federal Helium Reserve, in Texas, a move that depressed helium prices and diminished the possibilities for a competitive helium market.
The level of closeness between Syria and the USSR also diminished the possibilities of Soviet policies in Iraq.
"There's a harp in that piano, there's a girl inside that boy," runs The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities, which might have been lifted from The Night of the Hunter's book of nursery rhymes.
They minimized and diminished the possibility of familial love.
