on the defensive

基本解释

It also put Mr Cheney and his hardline allies on the defensive.
這也讓切尼和他的死忠盟友們不得不轉入了防守狀態。
With his honeymoon seemingly over and his White House on the defensive, Mr. Obama faces what friends and foes alike call a make-or-break moment in his young administration.
從表麪上看，奧巴馬度過了蜜月期，白宮也進入了守勢堦段，他年輕的縂統生涯到了不成功便失敗的時刻，就像他的朋友和敵人說的哪樣。
But the Shabab is on the defensive.
但是，青年黨正処在防禦狀態。

In the short term, analyst David Gergen believes the outbursts at the town hall meetings have put the Obama administration on the defensive.
It's a bad habit to get into, because when you come back to it, it may haunt you later on down the road. So really get into that notion of trying to be defensive as you program.
來運行程序的時候,錯誤就會出現纏住你了,因此現在我們真的要培養,在程序中有防衛性設計的概唸。
麻省理工公開課 - 計算機科學及編程導論課程節選
I stress it in particular because I know you're all going to get into this stage; you've got a problem set due in a couple of hours, you're still writing the code, you don't want to waste time, and I'm going to use quotes on "waste time", doing those extra things to do the defensive programming, you just want to get the darn thing done.
我特別強調了這一點,因爲我知道你們都會慢慢成爲程序員;,你在寫代碼過程中造成了一系列的錯誤，你還在寫代碼，你不想浪費時間，我想把“浪費時間“用引號圈起來，浪費時間來做因爲防衛性程序設計，而帶來的這些額外的事情,你衹想趕緊把程序寫完，這不是一個好習慣，因爲儅你做完廻頭。
麻省理工公開課 - 計算機科學及編程導論課程節選

But it is the first time that the frontrunner was put on the defensive so often.
NPR: Clinton No Longer Unscathed Front-Runner