Download I. THE UNITED STATES AS A SUPERPOWER A. The American

I.
THE UNITED STATES AS A SUPERPOWER
A. The American Century and the Cold War
1. The United States has played a major world role, helping Europe and Japan recover from
World War II, espousing human rights and freedom, lavishing aid on allies, and
providing leadership in a politically fragmented world.
2. The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the communist victory in China, and regional
conflicts convinced U.S. policymakers that communist expansion must be thwarted.
3. World War II propelled the United States to a position of dominance in the global
economy and political supremacy and a leading role in world affairs.
4. The optimism and economic superiority of the United States were based on unusual
conditions such as wartime devastation elsewhere and the consequent need for American
goods.
5. The United States formed close economic alliances with the other developed nations and
sponsored large foreign aid programs in the developing world.
6. Most of the investments in the developing countries were in mining and cash crops,
which prolonged the dependency of the nations on foreign investments.
7. In time, however, American consumption of foreign goods, such as Japanese cars and
Middle Eastern oil, led to trade imbalances between the United States and other
countries.
8. The United States’ foreign relations were shaped by the Cold War.
a) The main policy during the Cold War was the domino theory, which revolved
around the belief that countries might fall, one by one, into the communist sphere
of influence.
b) The height of anti-communist hysteria in the United States was in the mid-1950s,
when Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957) began a campaign of identifying and
blacklisting people as “un-American” who did not share his views on the threat of
communism.
c) A major approach in dealing with Communism was multilateralism, which called
for the creation of a common front comprising the United States, Western Europe,
Japan, and Canada.
d) Most presidents and policymakers favored unilateralism, which called for solitary
actions by the United States if its interests were threatened, even if key allies
disagreed.
e) The main strategy adopted by the United States was containment, aimed at
preventing communists from gaining power and the Soviets gaining influence in
other nations.
9. A major means of deterrence between the two superpowers was known as Mutually
Assured Destruction (MAD), in which the U.S. and USSR used fear of nuclear weapons
as a restraint
10. U.S. defense became an enormous business, employing a fifth of the industrial work
force and a third of scientists and engineers by the 1960s, costing U.S. taxpayers
hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
11. Between the 1970s and the early 1990s, the rise of Western Europe and Japan as major
economies eroded U.S. dominance.
12. Growing U.S. defense budgets helped undermine the USSR but also made the U.S. the
world’s largest debtor nation, with ballooning federal deficits; President Bill Clinton
(g.1993–2001) eliminated the budget deficits, but debts skyrocketed again under his
successor, George W. Bush (g.2001–2009.
B. The United States, Wars, and the Developing Nations
1. In 1950, in order to prevent the success of the communists, the United States dispatched
its troops to Korea under the auspices of the United Nations.
2.
C.
The Korean War (1950-1953) ended in a stalemate and the division of the Korean
Peninsula.
3. The second major conflict in Asia was in Vietnam, which had been a French colony;
between 1963 and 1975, 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, where 58,000 died,
and 300,000 were wounded.
4. With support for war waning in the United States, United States forces were withdrawn
from Vietnam in 1973, and the communists took over the control of the country; war in
Vietnam ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $2 trillion and made Americans wary
of supporting other military interventions.
5. In general, the United States favored decolonization that opened business opportunities
for the U.S., pressuring the Dutch to abandon Indonesia and Britain to grant most of their
African colonies independence; Americans opposed independence for colonies, such as
French-ruled Vietnam and Portuguese-ruled Mozambique, where communists or leftists
dominated nationalist movements.
6. After decolonization, Americans offered generous aid to friendly nations and victims of
famine or natural catastrophes while funding the Green Revolution in agriculture, which
improved food production.
7. United States administrations also intervened in developing nations to install friendly but
often undemocratic regimes and also provided friendly governments or anti-leftist groups
with weapons, military advisers, intelligence agents, and funding.
8. U.S. interventions included Iran, Thailand, Honduras, and Chile during the Cold War.
The United States in the Global System After 1989
1. The dissolution of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the USSR in 1991 left the U.S. the
dominant world power, although the end of the Cold War helped inflame regional
conflicts and a new wave of global terrorism.
2. A number of African nations and Yugoslavia went through bloody civil wars in the
1990s; in most cases, the U.S. declined intervention.
3. Cold War policies sometimes came back to haunt Americans; for example, Iranian
resentment over the 1953 overthrow of their government still complicates U.S.-Iran
relations.
4. The Al Qaeda terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon
outside Washington, D.C., in September 2001, killed nearly 3,000 Americans, shocked
the nation, and sparked new domestic and foreign policies.
5. The attacks led to the adoption of new policies under President George W. Bush (g.20012009), which called for unilateral action against perceived dangers and possible domestic
terrorism but infringed upon civil liberties.
6. Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “axis of evil” for threatening their neighbors
and world peace; critics considered the Bush Doctrine a rationale for acquiring an
American empire through military action in violation of international law and the United
Nations charter.
7. The Bush administration resumed unilateralist U.S. foreign policies; rejecting opposition
from the United Nations and key U.S. allies, in 2003 the Bush Administration invaded
and occupied oil-rich Iraq.
8. Because of its unparalleled economic and military might, the United States assumed
heavy burdens, maintaining military bases and operations around the world; by 2011, the
U.S. accounted for 75 percent of arm sales to other nations, earning some $66 billion per
year.
9. Spiraling national debt, expensive global commitments, a housing market crisis, and lax
regulation of banks, corporations, and the stock market generated an economic meltdown
in 2008–2009 that soon spread to the rest of the world.
II.
10. Some observers proclaimed the end of the "American century" as its ideological
supremacy and control of the global order diminished.
THE CHANGING SOCIETIES OF NORTH AMERICA AND THE PACIFIC BASIN
A. Prosperity, Technology, and Inequality in the United States
1. By 2000, the United States accounted for a third of global production of goods and
services, but with 4 percent of the world population in 2011, Americans consumed
around 30 percent of all the world’s resources.
2. Traditional industries were replaced by high-tech ones, which revolutionized the U.S.
economy and the workplace.
3. The use of robots and computers led to the disappearance of a quarter of industrial jobs
in the United States.
4. Unlike most industrialized nations, the U.S. never developed a comprehensive welfare
state or national health insurance, and a widening gap separated the richest and poorest
Americans.
5. The rise of the suburbs has led to great economic inequalities between their residents and
those living in urban areas.
B. American Political Life: Conservatism and Liberalism
1. American politics since World War II has oscillated between conservatism and
liberalism.
2. The desire for stability after the Great Depression and World War II encouraged political
and social conservatism throughout the 1950s; few questioned their government or
prevailing social patterns.
3. During the 1960s, many Americans became open to new ideas and lifestyles as
liberalism became influential.
4. The 1960s were also a period of many technological achievements, witnessing the first
people to walk on the moon, the creation of the Peace Corps, and attempts to end poverty
and racism, but the era also fostered doubts, anger, and violence.
5. In the same decade, the younger generation rebelled against traditional values.
6. The conservatives rose to leadership in the 1970s, and the country began to return to
more traditional values and mores; with the exception of the 1990s, when the moderate
Bill Clinton was president, conservatives maintained their dominance of American
politics and the social agenda until 2009.
7. The conservative George W. Bush was elected in controversial, bitter 2000 and 2004
elections and sharply divided Americans between the two major political parties and
their divergent policies.
8. By 2008, Bush was widely disliked for the unpopular Iraq war, inadequate response to
Hurricane Katrina, spiraling national debt, controversial social and environmental
policies, and the economic meltdown of 2008; in the 2008 elections, Barack Obama (b.
1961) won the presidency, and his victory as the first nonwhite president electrified the
world, suggesting that U.S. society was changing.
9. Inheriting two wars and an economic crisis, Obama introduced policies to generate
economic recovery, withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, ordered the operation that killed
Osama bin Laden, recognized gay rights, supported immigration reform, and guided a
highly controversial health coverage plan ("Obamacare") through Congress.
C. American Society and Popular Culture
1. Social change affected ethnic minorities, families, women, and men.
2. African Americans, over 10 percent of the population, faced various forms of
discrimination, experiencing much poverty rates than whites.
3. The civil rights movement, organized in the 1950s, eventually forced courts, states, and
the federal government to introduce reforms; in the 1960s, the struggle for civil rights
reached its zenith under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).
4.
African Americans gradually gained legal equality and voting rights, although African
Americans were still more likely than whites to live in poverty, face unemployment, and
be imprisoned.
5. In the decades following World War II life in the United States became progressively
more cosmopolitan mainly due to immigration; by 2012 the U.S. population of 313
million, the world's third largest, was more diverse than ever.
6. Beginning in the 1960s many women joined feminist movements demanding equal legal
rights with men and improved economic status.
7. Americans quarreled over allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces,
marry, or establish legal partnerships; by 2013 a number of states had legalized same-sex
marriages.
8. The United States became the largest exporter of culture products to the rest of the world;
U.S.-made films, television programs, books, magazines, popular music, and sports
reached a global audience.
D. The Canadian Experience
1. Canada has maintained a bilingual (English and French) culture and has given more
autonomy to its provinces at the expense of the federal government.
2. Canada has been influenced by American culture and is a major trading partner of the
United States.
3. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wove the economic ties
of Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a closer relationship.
4. Canada has enjoyed a prosperous economy over the years, consistently ranking among
the top five nations in the annual U.N. Human Development Index of life quality, and its
citizens are generally more liberal on social and economic issues than Americans.
5. The immigration of millions of people from all over the world has turned Canada into a
multicultural nation.
E. The Pacific Basin Societies
1. Because of its natural resources, Australia has been able to offer a high standard of living
to its citizens.
2. In recent decades Australia has become a major destination for immigrants from Europe
and Asia; nearly a quarter of Australia’s people were born abroad.
3. With an economy based primarily on exporting minerals, wheat, beef, and wool,
Australia needed secure outside markets; torn between its European history and Asian
geography, Australians established closer trade and investment links to Southeast Asia,
East Asia, and the Pacific islands, fostering two decades of economic growth.
4. New Zealand cultivated close relations with the United States and then with nearby
Asian and Pacific countries, which, by 2000, accounted for one-third of the nation’s
trade.
5. New Zealand also offers a generous social welfare program and has allowed greater
immigration from Asia, while working to end discrimination against the native Maori
minority, who sought to maintain their Polynesian culture while adding modern
economic skills.
6. The decolonization of many Pacific Islands did not take place until 1962-1980, and in
fact some French colonies, such as Tahiti and New Caledonia, became “overseas
departments” of France and not fully independent.
7. The citizens of the Pacific Islands have joined forces to curb high-tech fishing from
industrialized countries and have joined Australia and New Zealand to stop nuclear
testing.
III. POLITICAL CHANGE IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
A. Despotisms, Democracies, and the United States
1.
B.
Social inequality, economic underdevelopment, and demands for change often generated
revolutionary and progressive political movements in impoverished villages and
shantytowns in Latin America and the Caribbean.
2. Some paternalistic but authoritarian reformers mobilized workers and peasants for change
but failed to empower the people or significantly improve their lives; one of these was
Juan Peron (1895–1974), who was elected Argentina’s president in 1946 and was an
autocratic reformer who marginalized the legislature and crushed opposition.
3. From the 1950s through the late 1980s, rightwing military governments and despots
ruled most countries, suppressing labor unions, student protesters, and democracy
activists to maintain stability.
4. The failures of the military governments allowed the rise of more democratic forms of
governments during the late 1980s.
5. The disillusionment with capitalism brought some leftist leaders to the fore in the past
few years, such as Evo Morales (b. 1959) in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez (1954-2013) in
Venezuela.
6. During the Cold War the United States intervened in the internal affairs of Latin America
under the banner of anti-Communism, which often meant the overthrow of democratic
governments; in 1954, the democratically-elected socialist government of Guatemala was
overthrown by the CIA, which led to decades of bloodshed and repression.
7. The U.S. served as neighborhood bully at times but also was a leading trading partner,
major source of investment capital, supplier of military and economic assistance, and
inspiration to the region’s democrats and free market enthusiasts.
The Legacy of Revolution: Mexico and Cuba
1. The early twentieth-century Mexican Revolution inspired hopes of reducing social
inequality, but the nation’s leaders emphasized economic growth over uplifting the poor
majority; average Mexicans still suffer from social injustice and economic deprivation.
2. For most of the twentieth century, Mexico was ruled by the Party of Revolutionary
Institutions (PRI), which preserved its power by unlawful means such as voter fraud.
3. The 1990s peasant revolt in Chiapas demonstrated that the PRI was not addressing rural
poverty.
4. The 2000 election of a non-PRI president, Vicente Fox, pro-U.S. rancher and free market
conservative, ended the seventy-year PRI monopoly on federal power.
5. In 2012, with 60,000 dead from rampant violence by drug cartels, crime syndicates, and
a failed war on drugs, the PRI returned to power under a new president, Enrique Peña
Nieto.
6.
Because of poverty and overpopulation, thousands of desperate Mexicans continue to
cross the border to the United States each year, legally or illegally, in search of a better
life.
7. Cuba, led by Fidel Castro (b. 1927), built a society dominated by a powerful communist
government, which came to power in 1959 in a revolution against a corrupt U.S.supported dictator.
8.
In 1961 Americans moved to isolate and then overthrow Castro's regime by organizing a
Cuban exile military force that landed at the Bay of Pigs; the invasion, poorly planned
and enjoying little popular support in Cuba, was routed—a humiliation for the U.S.
9. Castro became a firm Soviet ally, igniting even more U.S. opposition and precipitating
the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
10. Castro held a tight control over the economy and politics, policies which further
impoverished the nation; free speech was limited, and those who defied the government,
writers, homosexuals, and human rights advocates were jailed.
11. Seeking a better life, thousands fled to the United States during the next few decades;
40,000 Cubans left in 2013.
12. In an effort to weaken the Communist government of Cuba, the United States maintained
a trade embargo against the nation.
13. Castro remained in power for fifty years, but in 2008 an ailing Castro turned over
leadership to his brother Raul Castro (b. 1931), who offered some cautious reforms, with
Cuba sputtering toward a market economy.
C. Dictatorship and Democracy: Brazil and Chile
1. Few Latin American nations have had as much promise and experienced as many
problems as Brazil and Chile.
2. Brazil has 200 million people and the largest economy of Latin America; from the1940s
to the 1960s Brazil was run by democratic governments.
3. The military took over the government in 1964 and began two decades of harsh
despotism repressing dissidence and outlawing political parties.
4. Brazilian governments encouraged land speculators and foreign corporations to open up
the vast Amazon basin, the world’s largest tropical rainforest and river system; logging,
farming, mining, and ranching rapidly stripped virgin forest, destabilizing the
environment and displacing many of the 200,000 Indians living off its resources.
5. Under tremendous pressure democracy returned to Brazil in the mid-1980s.
6. In 2002, Brazilians elected Luis Ignacio da Silva (b. 1944), a leftist president who helped
foster dramatic economic growth; a booming economy (the world's seventh largest),
growing manufacturing, and discovery of offshore oil gave Brazil regional and
international clout, restoring national self-confidence.
7. Chileans enjoyed a long tradition of elected democratic governments sustained by a large
middle class, high rates of literacy and urbanization, and multiple political parties;
however, a wealthy elite of businessmen, military officers, and landowners held political
power, suppressing labor unrest.
8. In the 1970 election, a Socialist government headed by Salvador Allende (1908-1973)
came to power, promising to raise the standards of the living of the poor; employment
and economic production soared, and Allende’s party, Popular Unity, fostered a Chilean
cultural renaissance.
9. In 1973, a CIA-sponsored military coup overthrew the democratic government and in the
process killed Allende.
10. The military government, headed by Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), arrested 150,000
Allende supporters, detaining and torturing hundreds of political prisoners for years, and
murdering thousands of dissidents, sometimes in the national stadium.
11. Advised by U.S. economists, Pinochet installed a free enterprise economy, generating
growth and moderate middle-class prosperity but also incurred monumental foreign debt
and environmental degradation.
12. In 1989, democracy returned to Chile when a center-leftist government was voted into
office; the resulting center-left governments, often headed by presidents from Allende’s
Socialist Party, retained free enterprise while boosting health, housing, education, and
social spending.
IV. CHANGING LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN SOCIETIES
A. Latin American Economies
1. Latin Americans struggled to achieve the affluence common in the industrialized West or
eastern Asia but often enjoyed economic growth, forged rising literacy rates, and lowered
infant mortality rates.
2. Latin America has suffered severe income inequality; poverty, corruption, and tax
evasion by the rich have been characteristic of Latin American societies whose
aristocratic families or foreign corporations own most of the land.
3.
B.
C.
Economic hardships and the search for a better life have forced many poor farmers to
move to urban areas; in some nations, their traditional crops declining in value, farmers
have turned to growing coca and opium for making cocaine and heroin.
4. Hoping to improve their economies, many Latin American societies adopted
Neoliberalism, which promoted free market, privatization, and foreign investment; but
more people remained stuck in poverty because neoliberals failed to curb government
corruption, install honest judicial systems, foster labor-intensive industries, reduce the
power of rich elites, or decrease dependence on foreign loans and investment.
5. Argentina, which had adopted Neoliberalism wholeheartedly, suffered economic collapse
in 1998, and unemployment soared.
6. The election of pragmatic Peronist leftists in 2003 revived the Argentinian economy,
though economic growth has been uneven at times.
Latin American Societies and Religions
1. Since World War II, gender and family relations in Latin America have been transformed
by economic and political changes.
2. Women have entered the job market in large numbers and are often preferred to men in
factory jobs.
3. As exemplified by the presidencies of Isabel Peron (b. 1931) in Argentina and Violeta
Chamorro (g. 1990-1996) in Nicaragua, women have also made major headway in
politics; in 2006 Chilean voters chose socialist politician Michelle Bachelet, who filled
half her cabinet position with women .
4. The rise of Liberation Theology in the 1960s also modified Catholicism, a cornerstone of
Latin American societies; until the Vatican prohibited the movement in the 1980s, priests
favoring Liberation Theology cooperated with Marxist and liberal groups working for
social justice.
5. The first Latin American to head the Catholic Church, Pope Francis (pope 2013-), an
Argentine known for his modest lifestyle and concern for the poor, hoped to revitalize
the faith in a region containing 40% of the world's Catholics.
6. In Brazil, urbanization has led to the growth of shantytowns and numerous health issues
for the state, while race still determines the social status of an individual.
Latin American and Caribbean Cultures
1. The works of Latin American authors such as the Nobel Laureates Gabriel Garcia
Marquez (b. 1928) and Jorge Amado (1912-2001) have been recognized on an
international level.
2. The greatest epic poem of the leftist Chilean writer and former diplomat Pablo Neruda
(1904–1973), General Song, published in 1950, portrays the entire hemisphere's history,
showing an innocent pre-Columbian America cruelly awakened by Spanish conquest; in
1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for literature.
3. Brazil's New Cinema movement, launched in 1955, tried to replace Hollywood films with
films reflecting Brazilian life.
4. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new style of music called “New Song,” which was based on
folk music and progressive politics, became popular in Chile.
5. The military juntas that came to power in the 1960s and 1970s banned New Song and
executed or exiled the artists who performed it.
6. In Jamaica, Rastafarianism, a blend of Christianity, African religions, and local
influences, became a popular cultural expression from the 1930s, ultimately becoming a
movement of the black poor, seeking to redistribute wealth.
7. In the 1960s, Jamaican musicians also created a new style of music called reggae, which
blended North American blues and Afro-Jamaican traditions; reggae's international
popularity owed much to Bob Marley (1945–1981), a Rasta, and his group, the Wailers,
the first international superstars from a developing nation.
D.
Latin America and the Caribbean in the Global System
1. In time the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean established close ties with each
other.
2. Asian nations, especially China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, captured a growing
share of Latin America’s traditional overseas markets while investing in Latin America
and the Caribbean.
3. Because of its economic vulnerabilities, Latin America has not found a strong, stable
position in the global system.