soft underbelly

English

Etymology

From Winston Churchill’s phrase “soft underbelly of the Axis (or Europe)” (1942).[1]

Pronunciation
  • Audio (AU)(file)

Noun

soft underbelly (plural soft underbellies)

  1. (idiomatic) A weak spot; a soft spot.
    • 2009 March 30, Mustafa Qadri, “Nato's soft underbelly”, in The Guardian‎:
      But supply convoys are the soft underbelly of a powerful, modern military force that the Taliban is incapable of matching in conventional combat.
    • 2014 May 12, Suzanne Goldenberg, “Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn”, in The Guardian‎:
      Scientists have known for years that the Thwaites glacier is the soft underbelly of the Antarctic ice sheet, and first found that it was unstable decades ago.
    • 2014, Christian Promitzer; Siegfried Gruber; Harald Heppner, editors, Southeast European Studies in a Globalizing World, LIT Verlag Münster, page 119:
      The current, predominantly right-wing perception is of the Balkans as a contagious disease, an infectious sore in the soft underbelly of Europe, best left to fester in isolation.

Translations

References
  1. Were “Soft Underbelly” and “Fortress Europe” Churchill Phrases?, The Churchill Project, April 1, 2016

Further reading
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