paper tiger

Language: en

Meaning: (idiomatic)A seeminglyfierceor powerfulperson, country or organisationwithouttheabilityto back up their words; apparently powerful but actuallyineffective.Synonym:sheep in wolf's clothingAntonym:wolf in sheep's clothing2008August 23, Ian Kershaw, “The twisted road to war”, inThe Guardian‎[1]:The League of Nations was by this time scarcely even apaper tiger, devoid of credibility since its divisions and pusillanimity had been so clearly laid bare following Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in the autumn of 1935.2010October 11, Roger Cohen, “Iran, the Paper Tiger”, inThe New York Times‎[2],→ISSN:Iran is apaper tiger, a postmodern threat: It has many uses but a third Western war against a Muslim country is a bridge too far.

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