...The fall of the Soviet empire has presented various political and economic opportunities and threats to the world, for these reasons it’s considered one of the major events taking place since the Second World War. The Soviet fall besides various internal factors has been facilitated by US and Western counter parts to attempt to contain further Communism. The Truman doctrine was a US strategy to halt expansion of Soviet Union in the course of the Cold War. In this doctrine the then US President Harry S. Truman vowed to contain the spread of communism in the world particularly in Europe. This doctrine encouraged the US to back every country with both economic and military assistance if the Soviet Union or communism threats its stability. The aim of this paper is to review The Truman Doctrine was one of the significant historical approaches deployed between 1945 and 2008 that has had both negative and positive outcomes for the world. Historical Background In order to analyze the Truman doctrine and its different elements, it is necessary to consider the complex historical context in which it originated, and one that explains how a president such as Harry Truman, laid the foundations seated on the principles of the emerging American political realism after the Second World War (Bostdorff, 2008). The creation of international organizations like the UN itself and its Security Council, had brought hope back to the role, they were going to have to condition the behavior of the great...
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...At the Supreme Court, the atmosphere was tense. This decision was going to change America forever. Not to mention. The Cold War put great pressure on President Truman during this time. It was awkward for Americans to be treating their own people of color poorly, then turn around and try to court a third world country. Even African diplomats could not be treated respectively outside of Washington D.C.. Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, noted about this discrimination saying it “remains a source of constant embarrassment to this Government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations” (Cushman). These were the reasons change was needed in the American government. It was no longer acceptable if this nation truly wanted to be a powerhouse....
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...iTHE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Module prepared for CIAO By Richard Ned Lebow August 2000 The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is generally regarded as the most serious military confrontation of the Cold War. American destroyers deployed along a picket line to intercept Soviet ships transporting missiles and nuclear warheads to Cuba while American air, ground and naval forces prepared for air strikes against Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba and a follow-up invasion. The Strategic Air Command was put on an unprecedented state of alert – “DEFCON II,” only one step away from “war is imminent.” On Saturday morning,October 27, President Kennedy and his advisors were pessimistic about their ability to preserve the peace. Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General of the U.S., had “the feeling that the noose was tightening on all of us, on Americans, on mankind, and that the bridges to escape were crumbling.”1 In Moscow, the tension was “phenomenal.” On Sunday morning, General Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and his advisors worried “that Kennedy intended to declare war, to launch an attack” against the Soviet Union.2 That same day, the two leaders reached an accommodation that, in retrospect, turned out to be one of the key turning points of the Cold War. 1 OVERVIEW The “Caribbean crisis,” as it was known in the former Soviet Union, was attributed to the Kennedy administration’s unwillingness to accept the status quo in Cuba. Unalterably opposed...
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...John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "An unnecessary war," Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2003 In the full-court press for war with Iraq, the Bush administration deems Saddam Hussein reckless, ruthless, and not fully rational. Such a man, when mixed with nuclear weapons, is too unpredictable to be prevented from threatening the United States, the hawks say. But scrutiny of his past dealings with the world shows that Saddam, though cruel and calculating, is eminently deferrable. Should the United States invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein? If the United States is already at war with Iraq when this article is published, the immediate cause is likely to be Saddam's failure to comply with the new U.N. inspections regime to the Bush administration's satisfaction. But this failure is not the real reason Saddam and the united States have been on a collision course over the past year. The deeper root of the conflict is the U.S. position that Saddam must be toppled because he cannot be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Advocates of preventive war use numerous arguments to make their case, but their trump card is the charge that Saddam's past behavior proves he is too reckless, relentless, and aggressive to be allowed to possess WMD, especially nuclear weapons. They sometimes admit that war against Iraq might be costly, might lead to a lengthy U.S. occupation, and might complicate U.S. relations with other countries. But these concerns are eclipsed by the belief...
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...------------------------------------------------- Post–World War II economic expansion From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Golden Age of capitalism" redirects here. Other periods this term may refer to are Gilded Age and Belle Époque. In the United States and several other countries, the boom was manifested insuburban development and urban sprawl, aided by automobile ownership. Many Western governments funded large infrastructure projects during this period. Here the redevelopment of Norrmalm and theStockholm Metro, Sweden. The post–World War II economic expansion, also known as the postwar economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of Capitalism, was a period of economic prosperity in the mid-20th century which occurred, following the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the early 1970s. It ended with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1973–1974 stock market crash, which led to the 1970s recession. Narrowly defined, the period spanned from 1945 to 1952, with overall growth lasting well until 1971, though there are some debates on dating the period, and booms in individual countries differed, some starting as early as 1945, and overlapping the rise of the East Asian economies into the 1980s or 1990s. During this time there was high worldwide economic growth; Western European and East Asian countries in particular experienced unusually high and sustained growth, together with full employment. Contrary to early...
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... BERNATH LECTURE The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms* The Cold War is not what it once was. Not only has the conflict itself been written about in the past tense for more than a decade, but historians’ certainties about the character of the conflict have also begun to blur. The concerns brought on by trends of the past decade – such trifles as globalization, weapons proliferation, and ethnic warfare – have made even old strategy buffs question the degree to which the Cold War ought to be put at the center of the history of the late twentieth century. In this article I will try to show how some people within our field are attempting to meet such queries by reconceptualizing the Cold War as part of contemporary international history. My emphasis will be on issues connecting the Cold War – defined as a political conflict between two power blocs – and some areas of investigation that in my opinion hold much promise for reformulating our views of that conflict, blithely summed up as ideology, technology, and the Third World. I have called this lecture “Three (Possible) Paradigms” not just to avoid making too presumptuous an impression on the audience but also to indicate that my use of the term “paradigm” is slightly different from the one most people have taken over from Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific revolutions. In the history of science, a paradigm has come to mean a comprehensive explanation, a kind of scientific “level”...
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...Storrs, L. (2006). Left-feminism, the consumer movement, and red scare politics in the united states, 1935-1960. Journal of Women's History, 18(3), 40-40-67,148. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/203248794?accountid=35812 In the United States, right-wing hostility to female consumer advocates who held federal jobs or had the ear of federal officials was an important source of the crusade against "Communists in government," a primary engine of the Second Red Scare. The hunt for communists in the U.S. government, which began in the 1930s and reached a fever pitch in the 1950s, reshaped the terrain of party politics and halted expansion of the American welfare state. Conservatives' attack on the New Deal-often seen as triggered by the rise of mass production unionism-also was a reaction to the emergence of a consumer movement that was feminist, anti-racist, and pro-labor. That movement was predominantly female and wielded more influence over federal policy than scholars have recognized. Focusing on the League of Women Shoppers, the Consumers' National Federation, and the fate of their members who obtained positions in such government agencies as the Office of Price Administration, this article argues that conservative anticommunists' gendered animosity to the consumer movement was critical to the pre-history of the federal employee loyalty program created in 1947, and that civil servants with ties to consumer groups were prominent among that program's casualties...
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...The History of US-Israel Relations Against Our Better Judgment The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel Louis Brandeis, flanked by Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, founding secretary of the American Federation of Zionists (right) and Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s (Source: Library of Congress) By Alison Weir April 18, 2013 Alison Weir is Executive Director If Americans Knew and President of the Council for the National Interest. She is available to give presentations on this topic and can be reached at contact@ ifamericansknew.org. How the U.S. “special relationship” with Israel came about W hile many people are led to believe that U.S. support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don't support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. foreign policy and defense experts opposed supporting the creation of Israel. They then similarly opposed the massive American funding and diplomatic support that sustained the forcibly established state and that provided a blank check for its aggressive expansion. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced. Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S.[1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision in the word "lobby." As this article will demonstrate, the Israel Lobby is considerably more powerful and...
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...Once the proud capital of Germany Berlin was divided by a barrier that was patrolled day and night by armed soldiers and guard dogs. On August 13, 1961 shortly after midnight police and soldiers in the Communist controlled Berlin moved quickly to set up barriers. Berliners woke to find their city divided into east and west sectors. A communist nation led by the Soviet Union was in control of East Berlin. While West Berlin was controlled by a democratic nation led by the United States (Epler, 1992). The Berlin Wall known as Berliner Mauer in German (Rosenberg, 2016). It was a symbol of the Cold War. Trying to cross the Wall meant risking one’s life. One side of the Wall people were free to do all the normal things. While the other side of the wall people’s freedom was being taken away. Imagine that your best friend lives a mile away. You have been pals since first grade. You do everything together: school, soccer games, sleepovers. One day, men come and put up a barbed-wire fence between your house and your buddy’s house. Later, they replace it with a very long, very tall concrete wall. Each slab weighs 6,000 pounds, and many of them are topped with sharp wire. When they finish, you stare at the giant wall that has split your home town in two. On your side the wall is ugly but not too scary. On the other side, rattling tanks, soldiers with machine guns and growling dogs keep people from trying to cross the barrier. The wall stands 12 feet high. Your friend...
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...Korean War Korean War The Korean War (25 June 1950 - armistice signed 27 July 1953[1] ) was a military conflict between the Republic of Korea, supported by the United Nations, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China (PRC), with military material aid from the Soviet Union. The war was a result of the physical division of Korea by an agreement of the victorious Allies at the conclusion of the Pacific War at the end of World War II. The Korean peninsula was ruled by Japan from 1910 until the end of World War II. Following the surrender of Japan in 1945, American administrators divided the peninsula along the 38th Parallel, with United States troops occupying the southern part and Soviet troops occupying the northern part.[2] The failure to hold free elections throughout the Korean Peninsula in 1948 deepened the division between the two sides, and the North established a Communist government. The 38th Parallel increasingly became a political border between the two Koreas. Although reunification negotiations continued in the months preceding the war, tension intensified. Cross-border skirmishes and raids at the 38th Parallel persisted. The situation escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950.[3] It was the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War.[4] The United Nations, particularly the United States, came to the aid of South Korea in repelling the invasion. A...
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...1963), commonly known by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until he was assassinated in November 1963. After military service as commander of Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated vice president and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. At age 43, he was the youngest to have been elected to the office,[2][a] the second-youngest president (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president.[3] To date, Kennedy has been the only Roman Catholic president and the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize.[4] Events during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race—by initiating Project Apollo (which would culminate in the moon landing), the building of the Berlin Wall, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested that afternoon and charged with the crime that night. Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald two days later, before a trial could take place. The FBI and the Warren Commission...
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... Part II: The Execution 12. In from the Cold 13. Poppy’s Proxy and the Saudis 14. Poppy’s Web 15. The Handoff 16. The Quacking Duck 17. Playing Hardball 18. Meet the Help 19. The Conversion 20. The Skeleton in W.’s Closet 21. Shock and . . . Oil? 22. Deflection for Reelection 23. Domestic Disturbance 24. Conclusion Afterword Author’s Note Acknowledgments Notes Foreword When a governor or any state official seeks elective national office, his (or her) reputation and what the country knows about the candidate’s background is initially determined by the work of local and regional media. Generally, those journalists do a competent job of reporting on the prospect’s record. In the case of Governor George W. Bush, Texas reporters had written numerous stories about his failed businesses in the oil patch, the dubious land grab and questionable funding behind a new stadium for Bush’s baseball team, the Texas Rangers, and his various political contradictions and hypocrisies while serving in Austin. I was one of those Texas journalists. I spent about a decade trying to find accurate information on Bush’s record in the Texas National Guard. My curiosity had been prompted by his failure to adequately answer a question I had asked him as a panelist in a televised debate with Ann Richards during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Eventually I published three books on Bush and his political consigliere, Karl Rove. During Bush’s presidency, many other...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve...
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...The Cuban Missile Crisis: Reading the Lessons Correctly Author(s): Richard Ned Lebow Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 431-458 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2150497 Accessed: 10/11/2008 23:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aps. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Academy of Political Science is collaborating with JSTOR to...
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...Contents Title Page Dedication Prologue CHAPTER ONE: Republicans and Democrats CHAPTER TWO: Values CHAPTER THREE: Our Constitution CHAPTER FOUR: Politics CHAPTER FIVE: Opportunity CHAPTER SIX: Faith CHAPTER SEVEN: Race CHAPTER EIGHT: The World Beyond Our Borders CHAPTER NINE: Family Epilogue Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Barack Obama Copyright Prologue IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions. “Where’d you get that funny name?” And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?” I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism...
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