China's military has grown increasingly forceful with the country's political leadership, a fact Mr. Gates acknowledged obliquely to reporters en route to Beijing.
That could mean forceful action inside countries where problems are developing, a policy Secretary General Kofi Annan has endorsed as a last resort.
Argentine governments and politicians may make forceful comments about their country's right to the islands — but those sentiments are not shared by all.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombian voters on Sunday overwhelmingly elected as their new president an American-educated former defense minister who oversaw a forceful counterinsurgency against the country's rebel groups.
She seems not to know how to make a home in Israel, and is afflicted by a sense of the country's forceful novelty: She was a cocktail waitress.
He not only is an authentic American hero but has also played a forceful role in the country's major debates over the past two decades: Iraq, campaign finance, immigration and normalization with Vietnam.
Mr. Porphant, an associate professor of economics at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, said that pressure had been building in recent years for more transparency, partly as a result of political turmoil that has emboldened Thais to be more forceful in confronting the country's elite and questioning the tenets of the political system.
That was in fact the first forceful conversion in the country after the Christianization of Bulgaria five centuries earlier.
Nor did she care to compare Japan's women with the forceful feminists of western countries.
Mr. Bush used his most forceful language to denounce countries that the United States publicly ranks among the least democratic.
I was with Kevin Rudd, the prime minister of Australia, today, who was very forceful in suggesting that countries around the world, those with the capacity to do so, take the steps that are needed to fill this enormous hole in global demand.
