on the defensive

基本解释

It also put Mr Cheney and his hardline allies on the defensive.
这也让切尼和他的死忠盟友们不得不转入了防守状态。
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.
从表面上看，奥巴马度过了蜜月期，白宫也进入了守势阶段，他年轻的总统生涯到了不成功便失败的时刻，就像他的朋友和敌人说的哪样。
But the Shabab is on the defensive.
但是，青年党正处在防御状态。

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.
来运行程序的时候,错误就会出现缠住你了,因此现在我们真的要培养,在程序中有防卫性设计的概念。
麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选
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.
我特别强调了这一点,因为我知道你们都会慢慢成为程序员;,你在写代码过程中造成了一系列的错误，你还在写代码，你不想浪费时间，我想把“浪费时间“用引号圈起来，浪费时间来做因为防卫性程序设计，而带来的这些额外的事情,你只想赶紧把程序写完，这不是一个好习惯，因为当你做完回头。
麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

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