How to Use counterforce in a Sentence

counterforce

noun
  • Merkel is a counterforce to ignorance and bluster, and the free world will miss her when she is gone.
    — New York Times, 25 Oct. 2021
  • There must be a counterforce that comes from within Congress.
    — USA TODAY, 25 July 2023
  • The counterforce from a slowdown in sales is a rise in demand for the kind of rentals that Arbor finances.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 14 July 2022
  • That has created this kind of counterforce, so that those who are within a system can have greater leverage to force or compel change.
    — Kathleen Ronayne and Hilary Powell, USA TODAY, 23 June 2020
  • And where there’s no constitutional counterforce, as with the pardon power, there’s just a rampage of corruption.
    — Ross Douthat, Mercury News, 22 Jan. 2026
  • The worst-case scenario would be the path the United States is on, driven by powerful forces and unchecked by any realistic counterforce.
    — Bruce Sibley, Time, 29 May 2026
  • Or maybe fast-food chains did streamline their business processes with the help of new technologies, but at the same time, maybe there were productivity-sucking counterforces.
    — Greg Rosalsky, NPR, 18 Mar. 2025
  • The strike, known as a counterforce strike, would be concentrated away from major population and industrial centers.
    — Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 29 Mar. 2022
  • The idea is for two pylons to be attached to a special structure on the tower with cables that are expected to exert a counterforce should the tower start tipping more dangerously.
    — Elisabetta Povoledo, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2024
  • History shows that autocratic states like Russia are only deterred by a strong counterforce from a rival that balances it and threatens its survival.
    — William Walldorf, TIME, 7 Mar. 2025
  • Despite this, America’s counterforce lead has actually grown.
    — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 3 May 2023
  • In many ways, the logic of a counterforce strategy parallels the logic of traditional military strategy.
    — Charles L. Glaser, Foreign Affairs, 5 Oct. 2023
  • Achieving peace in Gaza will therefore require a counterforce to Israel’s domestic political pressures.
    — Eric Levitz, Vox, 3 June 2024
  • What counterforce allows for a real accessible infrastructure of economic and cultural exchange?
    — Bernadine Bröcker Wieder, Rolling Stone, 9 Mar. 2021
  • The most direct counterforce is federal legislation, since Congress has the constitutional authority to set the rules under which House elections are run in all 50 states.
    — Bruce Sibley, Time, 29 May 2026
  • Lynch’s portrayal of Rita — a fiercely independent woman with a strong sense of her beliefs — is inspired, a quiet, grounding counterforce to Ben-Adir’s moodier depiction.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Feb. 2024
  • Since the nadir of Russian power in the decade and a half following the Soviet collapse, Russia has bolstered both its nuclear deterrent and, to a degree, its counterforce capabilities.
    — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 3 May 2023
  • Both tacit and open resistance to all kinds of domination have marked Asia’s history, generating a persistent counterforce to authoritarianism.
    — Foreign Affairs, 6 Sep. 2022
  • First was the possibility that the United States was building new conventional weapons that could be used to attack China’s nuclear forces, a strategy known as conventional counterforce.
    — M. Taylor Fravel, Foreign Affairs, 10 Nov. 2023
  • America’s instinctive anticolonialism, however, was to butt heads with an ideological counterforce in Vietnam.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 2 Sep. 2022
  • Over the ensuing decades, as the pharmaceutical industry took shape and began sophisticated marketing operations, the FDA became an important counterforce to the commercial objective to sell as much product as possible.
    — J. Russell Teagarden, STAT, 10 Sep. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'counterforce.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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