Sentence:  William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote that Clinton would be “remembered in history as a man who feared, flinched and failed,” whose diffidence in the face of “Nazi-style ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia had “turned a superpower into a <WSD>subpower</WSD>." 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A minor power; Something that has control over a limited domain that falls within the larger domain of a greater power.