Given China's deep suspicions, his election would open a period of serious tension, anxiously watched in Washington, because the United States has pledged to help defend Taiwan and would be drawn into a cross-strait war.
He took office as a white knight with a mandate to end political corruption, and he eased global fears of a cross-straits war by reversing his stance and announcing that he had no plans to provoke China by declaring independence.
In dire economic straits after World War I, and forced to take in lodgers, she was at first skeptical of Hitler.
Many people have asked in these past years of straits what good a war would do.
"It's not an easy choice - is it the person who murdered the most citizens, or the one who led the country into the most desperate straits of poverty or war, or perhaps just he who trod most unscrupulously on those around him?
While the empire remained neutral supplies could still be sent to Russia through the Dardanelles, but prior to the Ottoman entry into the war the straits had been closed and in November they began to mine the waterway.
Fear of offending Beijing has become a leitmotif of western policy, but, in the case of Taiwan under Chen, there was a strong secondary element: a real fear that he might push the cause of formal independence, as against the present de facto independence, and thus provoke war across the strait.
The rollicking 20's had ended in the Depression, then there was war and the strait-laced 50's.
"This document is meant for Catholics all over the world, some of whom are in desperate straits because of poverty and war and other crises that make having a family life almost impossible," said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior analyst for the American newspaper The National Catholic Reporter.
Intriguingly, the Bosphorus Straits, once surely a Cold War strategic point of interest - the only exit point into the wider Mediterranean for the Soviet Black Sea Fleet - is no longer considered a priority.
They spent most of the rest of the war blockading the Straits of Otranto and the Dardanelles to prevent German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish warships from breaking out.
