The struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of two military blocs:

§ NATO (1949)

• intended to serve as a military counterweight to the Soviet forces in Europe

§ Warsaw Pact (1955)

• established as a response to the rearming of West Germany

Synthesis in AP World History

• Delian League

  • • collective security agreement in response to external threat

    • the Delian League founded among separate Greek states in 478 B.C. in response to the Persian threat to that era's "Western civilization."

    • At the instigation of Athens, then a superpower, the league was created although the capital was in Delos as today NATO's capital is in Brussels, not Washington.

    • A cold war was successfully carried on against Persia for one decade during which the Hellenic West reduced that Eastern invader's remaining strongholds.

    • But as the Persian danger receded, the league fell apart."

Khrushchev Thaw (De-Stalinazation)

The Thaw initiated irreversible transformation of the entire Soviet society by opening up for some economic reforms and international trade, educational and cultural contacts, festivals, books by foreign authors, foreign movies, art shows, popular music, dances and new fashions, and massive involvement in international sport

• 1956- Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s: cult of personality and the Great Purge.

  • Numerous uprising occurred in the months following including in Georgia, Hungary, and Poland

• 1956, Khrushchev introduced the concept of a minimum wage.

• 1957- plot against Khrushchev

• 1958-Shift away from collective housing

  • Promise to build 12 million city apartments and 7 million rural houses

  • Invididual kitchens

• 1961-Stalin: the body of dictator was removed from the Lenin's Mausoleum on the Red Square and then buried outside the walls of the Kremlin

• allowed some foreign movies, books, art and music.

• 1962, Khrushchev personally approved the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which became a sensation, and made history as the first uncensored publication about Gulag labor camps

October 1964-Khrushchev was dismissed

§ Korean War

• June 25, 1950 Determined to unify Korea by force, the Pyongyang regime ordered more than one hundred thousand troops across the thirty-eighth parallel in a surprise attack, quickly pushing back South Korean defenders and capturing Seoul on June 27

• U.S. government successfully persuaded the United Nations to adopt a resolution requesting all member states “to provide the Republic of Korea with all necessary aid to repel the aggressors.”

  • • supported by token ground forces from twenty countries, the U.S. military took action.

    • Americans and their allies eventually pushed North Korean forces back to the thirty-eighth parallel, thereby fulfilling the UN mandate

• Beyond the UN mandate

  • • Sensing an opportunity to unify all of Korea under a friendly government, U.S. leaders sent American forces into North Korea, where they soon occupied Pyongyang.

    • U.S. advances toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border caused the government of the People’s Republic of China to issue a warning:

      • • the U.S. incursion across the thirty-eighth parallel threatened Chinese national interests and could result in Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict

    • When U.S. leaders gave no indication of heeding China’s warning, some three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers surged across the Yalu River into North Korea

• Stalemate

  • • A combined force of Chinese and North Koreans pushed U.S. forces and their allies back into the south, and the war settled into a protracted stalemate near the original border at the thirty-eighth parallel

    • two more years of desultory fighting that raised the number of deaths to three million people—mostly Korean civilians—both sides finally agreed to a cease-fire in July 1953

• Effects

  • • intensified bitterness between north and south made the prospect for a unified Korea remote

    • China perceived the events as a great victory for the young nation -- it fought the most powerful military in the world to a draw.

    • hardened US foreign policy -- encouraged the globalization of containment

      • • Viewed the North Korean offensive as part of a larger communist conspiracy to conquer the world

        • U.S. government extended military protection and economic aid to the non-communist governments of Asia

        • entered into security agreements that culminated in the creation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), an Asian counterpart of NATO

        • By 1954 U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), who had contemplated using nuclear weapons in Korea, accepted the famous “domino theory.”

          • • “domino theory” -- strategic theory rationalized worldwide U.S. intervention on the assumption that if one country became communist, neighboring ones would collapse to communism the way a row of dominoes falls sequentially until none remains standing.

            • Subsequent U.S. administrations extended the policy of containment to areas beyond the nation’s vital interests and applied it to local or imagined communist threats in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia

§ Angolan Civil War

• independence in 1975 (from Portugal)

• economic instability, and political and ethnic divisiveness hampered post-independence nation building

• Civil War

  • • between 1975 and 2002 around half a million people lost their lives in the conflict

    • Justin Pearce, a research associate at the University of Cambridge and a former correspondent in Angola, cames to the conclusion: For many of those who lived through the conflict, there was little meaning behind it.

      • • The Angolan civil war may have been considered a Cold War proxy war by the rest of the world, but few ordinary Angolans cared about that ideological divide

    • rivalry between two groups, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)

      • • MPLA considered Marxist

        • UNITA styling itself anti-Communist

• Cold War

  • • Cuba, backed by the Soviet Union, fought alongside the MPLA

    • UNITA was supported by the United States and had help from South African forces

• The MPLA won the war through military might in the culmination of a process whereby firepower, blood-shed and starvation were employed

§ Sandinista-Contras conflict in Nicaragua

• The Sandinistas came to power when they overthrew long-time dictator Anastacio Somoza in 1979

  • • United States offered recognition and aid to the new Sandinista government

    • President Carter’s commitment to human rights contributed to this shift in U.S. cold war policy—which also led to withdrawal of U.S. support for Latin American dictators and to the negotiations of the 1979 Panama Canal Treaty that gave Panama sovereignty over all its territory, including the Canal Zone (restored by treaty to Panama on 31 December 1999).

• U.S. efforts to destabilize Sandinista rule in Nicaragua

  • • President Reagan believed that the Sandinistas were abetting communist rebels elsewhere in Central America, as in El Salvador

    • Reagan halted aid to Nicaragua and instituted an economic boycott of the country

    • 1983 Reagan offered increasing support—monetary and military—to the Contras, a CIA-trained counterrevolutionary group dedicated to overthrowing the Sandinistas

    • the Contras engaging over time in such activities as the bombing of oil facilities and the mining of harbors

    • 1984 Congress imposed a two-year ban on all military aid to the Contras

    • 1986 and early 1987 -- Representatives of the Reagan administration were accused of going outside the law to provide funds for the Contras in 1986, illegally using the profits that accrued from secretly selling weapons to Iran

• 1989 agreement provided for the presence of a UN peacekeeping force, for monitored elections, and for the disarming of the Contras

  • • February 26, 1990 Violeta Barrios de Chamarro election was a repudiation of over 10 years of Sandinista rule

    • The United States saw Chamarro’s victory as validation of its long-time support of the Contras

    • President Bush announced an end to the U.S. embargo against Nicaragua and pledged new economic assistance