State Building, Expansion, and Conflict, 1900 to Present (Part 2) Flashcards
~Cold War
● Most of the world was divided into hostile camps, led by the US and the USSR
● Resulted in a nuclear arms race and the creation of massive military-industrial complexes that still operate today
● State of rivalry that came to exist between the US and the USSR
~Decolonization
● Deprived the European powers of their empires
● Sometimes through peaceful negotiation
● Sometimes through violent separation
● Dozens of new nations were formed in Asia, Africa and the Pacific
~Al-Qaeda terrorist attack
● September 11, 2001
● Began a new global struggle
● The US-led war on terror, which sparked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more generally sharpened tensions between the West and the Islamic world
● Masterminded by Osama bin Laden
~United Nations (UN)
● Came into being at war’s end and was designed to be stronger and more durable than the League of Nations
~Yalta Conference
● A key wartime summit in early 1945 to transform Eastern Europe into a Soviet sphere of influence
● Disagreements arose between the Soivets and the Anglo-Americans
~Bretton Woods system
● Soviets refused to take part in it
● Created by the Anglo-Americans to facilitate free trade after the war
~Non-aligned movement
● Formed in 1961, tahnks largely to major players like Gamal Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana
● Eventually came to include 120 states, although formal cooperation among them was not extensive
● Many members ended up aligning with one superpower or another
~Arms race
● The Cold War gave birth to the largest arms race
● Complete with nuclear arsenals, and while the US and USSR neve went to war with each other, an estimated 50 million people died in the dozens of small and medium-size conflicts that were ofught worldwide during the Cold War
~Iron curtain
● Descent of Soviet power over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania (until 1961), and eastern hal fo Germany
● Appeared poised to exapnd into Iran, Turkey and Greece, which would have brough the USSR closer to the oil fields of the Middle East and vital waterway of the easter Meidterranean
~Containment
● The US strategy divised by the diplomat George Kennan
● Contain communism
~Truman Doctrine
● US committed politically to containment in 1947
● Pledged assistance to Greece and Turkey and any and all countries whose political stability is threatened by communism
~Marshall Plan
● Pumped more than $13 billion of aid and investment into a Europe in dire need of reconstruction
● Containment
● Reduce economic desperation, made the spread of communism less likely
~Berlin Blockade of 1948
● Soviets suddenly cut off highway and rail traffic between West Berlin and the western half of Germany
● Easy for the Soviets to stop ground transport without provoking violence, but when the US began to fly airplanes through Soviet-controlled airspace to West Berlin, Stalin faced a choice: allow the flights to continue or shoot the airplanes down and start an actual war
● The Soviets backed down, seeming to validate hte containment strategy
~North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
● The US committed militarily to the Cold War in 1949
● A strategic alliance that bound America to Canada, Britain and nine other European states, and whose membership steadily grew over time
~Warsaw Pact
● The Soviets created their own militay bloc to oppose NATO
~First Soviet atomic-bomb test
● Erased America’s edge in military technolgoy in 1949
~Communist victory in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
● Rbought Mao Tse-tung to power as a new ally of the USSR
● China’s Nationalist regime fled to Taiwan, which remains non-communist to this day, ahotugh the PRC claims it as its own
~Korean War (1950-1953)
● Encouraged by Mao and supported in a morelimited way by Stalin, the comunist northern part of Korea attempted to conquer the southern half, which was defended by a UN army led by the US
● Containment, but for potentially hgiher stakes than in Berlin
● Confined to the peninsula
~Domino principle
● The belief that if one country in a region fell to comunism, the rest would too
● America’s involvement were based on this
~Third World countries
● Less developed and/or newly decolonized nations
● Many sought to remain neutral or unaligned
● Most were open to superpower influence, as were national-liberation movements worldwide
~Proxy wars
● Fighting a war by using proxy
● Korean War
● Vietname War
~Cuban Revolution (1959)
● Heightened tensions by placeing a communist regime and Soveit ally less than 100 miles off the US coast
~Vietnam wars (1945-1975)
● Began with the liberation of Indochina from French colonization and continued with the division of Vietnam
● After France’s defeat in 1954, America attempted to prop up the unpopulat southern regime against invastion by the communist north
● The US effort took a sharp turn for the worse in 1968 and ended with withdrawal in 1973, opening hte way for communist victory in 1975
~Nikita Khrushchev
● Less hard-line leader replacing Stalin after his death in 1953