But the Pentagon's standoffishness towards the Chinese military has not been helping.

ECONOMIST: Defence in East Asia

German standoffishness toward the EU is now based in law: a 2009 ruling by Germany's Constitutional Court allowed it to ratify the Lisbon treaty but limited further transfers of power to Brussels.

ECONOMIST: Germany's role in the world

Something else we noted in one of the towns that had been freed from Iraqi control was that the local people, who are Kurds, greeted the Kurdish fighters as well as the American soldiers with no standoffishness at all.

CNN: Ben Wedeman: Iraqis abandon northern ridge

The faults that turned her colleagues in government and the public against her standoffishness, self-aggrandizement, a tendency to respond to every criticism with spin and wagon-circling, a pattern of rewarding loyalty rather than competence were all on display during her tenure at Hearst for anyone who was looking.

FORBES: Cathie Black Out as NYC Schools Czar? You Don't Say.