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Global History
Directions: Read the passages below and then answer the questions at the end of the
passage.
Passage 1
Cold War
EVENT
Though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union stopped short of
open warfare, numerous incidents and crises demonstrated the seriousness of the rivalry,
which became known as the Cold War. The hostility and mistrust that defined the
relationship was all the more intense because it pitted not only two great powers against
each other but also two clashing ideological systems: communism and capitalism.
Beginning in the late 19th century, a rivalry over economic development and influence in
eastern Asia had evolved between the United States—then just emerging as a serious
world power—and czarist Russia. When the Russian Revolution of 1917 established a
new government based on communist principles, the United States stood in full
opposition, especially when Vladimir Lenin, as the new leader of the Soviet Union, soon
declared his ambition to export the revolution and overthrow capitalist systems
everywhere. The response by the United States and Europe was to send a small
expeditionary force to help Russian monarchist, counterrevolutionary forces in 1918,
which was unsuccessful.
The world was soon faced with World War II, and the Soviet Union, the United States,
and the United Kingdom became Allies to defeat Nazi Germany. Still, the British and
Americans never entirely trusted the Soviets, who had cooperated with Nazi Party leader
Adolf Hitler until Operation Barbarossa occurred. After the war ended, Joseph Stalin
insisted that Eastern Europe come under the Soviet sphere of influence. However, the
United States was unwilling to let Stalin dictate the shape of the postwar world, and U.S.
president Harry Truman emerged as a more determined opponent of communism.
Between 1945 and 1947, Stalin ensured the installation of pro-Soviet communist regimes
in Eastern European countries heavily dependent on the Soviet Union. Those actions
alarmed the United States and other Western governments, prompting Winston
Churchill's "iron curtain" speech (1946).
Germany had been divided into four occupation zones, with Great Britain, the United
States, France, and the Soviet Union each governing their own sectors. As hostility
between the Soviet Union and the West grew, Stalin decided to establish the Soviet zone
in the East as a separate communist state with the Berlin occupation zone at the center.
The situation came to a head in 1948, when Stalin set up a blockade of the western half of
Berlin; Truman responded with the Berlin airlift. By 1949, Stalin had lifted the blockade.
Yet Germany remained definitively divided into two separate nations.
The Greek Civil War prompted the introduction of the Truman Doctrine (1947), which
publicly committed the president to a containment policy. Another U.S. initiative for the
containment of communism was the Marshall Plan of 1948, which aided the recovery of
Western Europe and which the Soviets saw as a direct challenge.
In Cold War politics, 1949 proved to be a pivotal year, which began with the creation of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counter any Soviet threat. In August,
the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear device, thus ending the American
monopoly on such weapons and the military superiority that came with it. By the end of
that year, the Chinese Communist Revolution came to an end, and the following year, the
Soviet Union and China entered into an alliance.
Confronted with those communist gains, the U.S. National Security Council presented
Truman with NSC-68: U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security (1950), which
argued that the Cold War had to be given a new priority. That new level of intensity was
reflected in the Truman administration's response to developments on the Korean
Peninsula in the spring of 1950. Korea had been divided into separate nations following
the end of World War II, much as Germany had been. The two Koreas coexisted
uncomfortably until the Korean War began. Truman reacted forcefully and led an effort
in the United Nations to commit troops to help the South Koreans fend off the communist
invasion.
U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower ended the Korean War in 1953 with the peninsula
still divided and maintaining an uneasy peace. With Eisenhower scaling back American
military spending and relying more on nuclear weapons for defense, the Cold War
seemed to be stabilizing. Nevertheless, a second red scare dominated American political
life. There had been continuous efforts to suppress communist political activity in the
United States, which culminated in a very public, hysteria-filled campaign, led by U.S.
senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the
1950s.
During that same period, the United States had grown wary of Soviet actions under
Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1955 formed the Warsaw Treaty Organization to counter
NATO. That development, the launch of Sputnik, the building of the Berlin Wall, and an
ever-escalating nuclear arms race provoked fear among Americans. That fear was
exacerbated by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs
invasion. In October 1962, when U.S. president John F. Kennedy discovered that the
Soviets were installing nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, posing a direct threat to American
cities, he demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
very nearly developed into open war.
Another region of Cold War concern was Southeast Asia. When the French were defeated
in the Indochina War in 1954, Vietnam was divided into a communist north and a U.S.supported south. The United States was intent on preventing the spread of communism to
South Vietnam based on a new ideology known as the domino theory. More than ever,
U.S. leaders were convinced that communism must not be allowed to spread to other
countries, a view that proved disastrous for the U.S. military in the emerging Vietnam
War.
At first, very small numbers of U.S. soldiers were stationed in Vietnam in a merely
advisory role, but by 1964, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson began to commit ever
larger numbers of combat troops. Johnson's presidency was ruined by his commitment to
Vietnam, and by the time U.S. president Richard Nixon ended U.S. involvement in the
conflict in 1973, nearly 60,000 American soldiers had died, along with millions of
Vietnamese. By 1975, North Vietnamese forces finally overran South Vietnam; the U.S.
government was humiliated.
The remainder of the 1970s saw relative Cold War calm as U.S. leaders pursued a policy
of détente. In early 1972, Nixon visited China in a bid to normalize relations with that
nation's communist government.
The Soviet Union, which had broken its alliance with China in disputes over borders and
leadership of the communist world, did not want to be left out of the new spirit of
"peaceful coexistence" between communist and capitalist nations. Thus, Nixon visited the
Soviet Union and its leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and the two men signed the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty (1972).
Despite the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (1979), signed by Brezhnev and U.S.
president Jimmy Carter, the end of the decade brought renewed tensions. The two
superpowers clashed in various areas of the world as they tried to influence revolutionary
movements. Particularly disturbing to the United States was Soviet and Cuban support
for communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua and Brezhnev's 1979 Afghanistan invasion.
The 1980s saw an escalation of tensions that equaled those of the early Cold War. Ronald
Reagan became U.S. president in 1980 and pledged to stand firm against the "evil
empire" of the Soviet Union. The arms race resumed with new vigor, as Reagan spent
more than $2 trillion on defense during his presidency and employed belligerent rhetoric
in his public pronouncements on the Soviet Union and communism in general. The
Soviets matched Reagan's hard-line policies by cracking down on dissent at home and in
Eastern European countries like Poland while building up their own military.
Despite that environment of fear and mistrust, the Cold War neared its end. In 1985,
Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and pledged thorough reforms
of the entire communist system. His policies of perestroika and glasnost responded to the
need for change in a system that had never been able to compete with the West in
industrial production and had stifled freedom of thought and creativity.
Those policies relaxed the iron grip the Soviet Union had maintained for 40 years over
the countries of Eastern Europe. It was in that part of the world that the structures of the
cold war first began to crumble. Soviet withdrawal left the communist governments in
Eastern Europe isolated and vulnerable, and in 1989, they began to give way to popular
democratic revolutions. The Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution of 1989 was mostly
nonviolent, and soon nearly all the Eastern European nations had new, democratic,
noncommunist governments. German reunification occurred in 1990. Only one year later,
nationalist movements throughout the Soviet Union destroyed the communist system, and
Soviet republics became wholly independent or part of the Russian Federation. Those
former communist countries commenced the slow and often painful transformation to
capitalist, open-market economic systems.
The Cold War ended definitively in 1991. Communist governments remained, notably in
China, Cuba, and North Korea, but they did not present the same threat to U.S. national
interests, despite more or less open hostility between those nations and the U.S.
government. In place of that bipolar world, in which two great superpowers confronted
one another and sought to gain influence at each other's expense in various parts of the
world, the United States in the post-Cold War period has been faced with a fragmented
international scene, with no major ideological, military, or economic foe to challenge its
domination of world affairs. That situation presents its own challenges but lacks the
dramatic clash of opposing ideologies that characterized life during the Cold War.
Answer the following questions on a separate piece of
paper:
What is the definition of Cold War?
Why did the Cold War begin after WWII?
What is CONTAINMENT?
Passage 2
On the Cold War and Society
Upon looking at American society during the time period of the late twenties to mid forties, it
is evident that a change had occurred in the way the society regarded life in general and the
many related processes and ideas. There were many people who believed in a life filled with
fun and living life for life, and no more. The invention of new dances, styles of dress created
because they were fun, social conduct, were all things prevalent in this era.
After the second World War, America, and the world, was changed. This change however, did
not destroy the care-free nature the youth of society had adopted. On the contrary, the
soldiers back from the war realized that life was there for the living, and some also believed
they deserved it.
Russia’s alliance with the US soon began to crumble, however, and the second communist scare
began. After a short series of events, the United States and Russia were locked in a cold war,
and America was changed forever.
The Cold War prompted a sense of fear in the American. Fed by the United States Government
and the media, which could easily be linked together, the American people began to wonder.
They wondered just how many communists there were living in the US. They wondered if these
communists could destroy America from within. They wondered if the Russians would fire
missiles at us, or we at them.
The years ahead would be rough. The fear and tension all American citizens held was holding
strong and the events as a result of this fear would not do well to dispel it.
In the early fifties, the United States went to the aid of the southern half of Korea. North
Korea was a communist nation, and, being the noble people the US are, an official “police
action” began. More commonly referred to as the Korean War, the United States sought victory
for the democratic South Koreans. This victory was achieved and the gallant “police” heroes
trooped on home, having struck a blow against communism.
Russia was still the real threat and enemy, though. This enmity showed itself again in the
sixties’ “race to space.” President John F. Kennedy organized NASA, the nation’s newest
weapon against communism. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s job was to
make it into space first. Depending on the accepted definition of the term “make it to space,”
both Russia and the US could have won the award.
Russia’s first successful space operation launched the satellite “Sputnik” into orbit, creating a
huge security risk for the US. First, the Russians now had the potential means to spy on the US
without them knowing where or when. Second, it was theorized that with more equipment like
Sputnik, Russia could potentially launch into space-to-earth warfare. For these reasons, the US
sped up their own space program.
The United States, seeing Russia’s Sputnik in orbit, pushed their program to the point where
the first man was rocketed into space. Now having reset the equilibrium, the US sought to push
the tables the other way and show the communists some fear themselves.
This particular period of the beginnings of space exploration brought on a wild massacring of
the facts and realities surrounding space and Russia. One evidence of this can be found by
looking at the James Bond films of this time. In one film, the British agent must figure out how
to stop the Russians from firing a laser at various targets on the continental United States from
space.
Things such as films, radio presentations, books, and newspaper articles pushed the American
citizens into wondering just what Russia was capable of, militarily.
History continued into the next years when the United States, under President Lyndon B.
Johnson, decided to aid the South Vietnamese in their war against the oppressive and
communist North Vietnamese government. Thousands upon thousands of men and women in the
army were sent overseas as well as fresh recruits and draftees. These young people soon saw
firsthand just what a communist could do.
By this time, the anti-communist prejudices were running stronger than ever, and the American
people just couldn’t get enough of hating “commies.” The eighties brought more stalemate and
more anti-communist media, including another James Bond film titled “Goldeneye,” in which
our hero needed to stop yet another Russian satellite from destroying America and Britain.
When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics finally crumbled and became separate countries in
the late eighties, communism no longer seemed such a threat. This is when we must examine
just what part the Cold War played in the formation of today’s American society. The Cold War
took nearly 40 years to be resolved, and left a lasting, if not easily visible print on America.
Returning to the opening paragraph concerning the care-freeness of the twenties through
forties, we can see that during the Cold War, this seemed to disappear. The mind set of the
Cold War American was not to go out in public all the time because there were communists
everywhere and missiles could be flying at any moment. Over the 40 years, anomalies sprang
up; groups of people who wanted to go out and be together. These groups didn’t stay though,
and were replaced by yet more household Americans.
Today, the exciting life of a twenties, thirties, or forties young person is all but gone. Staying
at home has become part of the American dream. The time spent fearing communists at home
stuck with the citizens and became part of the society.
The reason for staying at home is not a still-active fear that communists lurk around the
corner. Instead, it’s the sub-conscious memory that communists lurked around the corner that
compelled the brain to make it habit not to be too social. One could argue that it’s a subconscious fear that still exists, or that the space for a fear of communists is no longer filled, so
something new fills the position of the old fear with a new fear.
Many things today are indirect results of the Cold War. The volume of news-watchers for
instance, could increase since before the Cold War, as there were so many things going on in
the world that a citizen would need to watch news to keep up on the times. Another example
would be the enlargement of the American television: If Americans are to stay cooped up inside
their homes, they’ll need to occupy themselves. They may take to watching more TV than
normal, and realize that a larger set would be better.
The connections that can be drawn from the Cold War to the present are endless, as it
completely changed the American way of life. Perhaps the United States will come back to its
care-free days. But until then, an antisocial world superpower they shall be.
Answer the questions for Passage 2 on a separate piece of paper.
The British author attempts to explain the effect the Cold War has had on
American society.
Answer the following questions:
What is his view of the American way of life?
According to the author, what factors led up to this change in society?