bulwark

Crack either of those and the bulwark starts to crumble rapidly.

That means that you are the refuge of scoundrels and a bulwark of liberty.

My main bulwark against wholesale exposure of the contents of my inbox is a 'Rob'.

A critical bulwark of the yeomanry, gossip sites.

Mass adoption is a bulwark against legislation, not a promoter of it.

Selling the N7 at $200 could be a bulwark against Apple and Amazon's domination of the tablet market.

The Constitution, in theory at least, should work as a bulwark ensuring that minority opinions are upheld.

The diminishing marginal utility of money seems like an excellent bulwark against trying to do those Schleppier things.

A large middle class, by definition, is a bulwark against this, because they are a large amount of people with interests more in line with the general populace.

The Berlin wall fell in 1989, removing the "bulwark against communism" rationale for US support of apartheid, and Mandela was released from jail in 1990.

The ugly design comments seem to me like a bulwark against those who might claim the author is an Apple hater for criticizing Apple's exclusive rights to symmetrical black rectangles.

Extreme racism was at the core of the proslavery argument: if the slaves were freed they would aspire to equality with whites, therefore slavery was the only bulwark of white supremacy and racial purity.

But that is in fact the bulwark of democracy: the majority using violence or the threat thereof to suppress royal families, warlords, etc. And while ideally the majority does not do this, oppressive rule by the majority is almost certainly preferable to any situation where the minority is in power.

An idea which people thought was ridiculous at the time?Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?