Though our historical reflection allows us to resolve that this approach had a great deal in common with colonialism in terms of the self-interested foreign rule which it often brought to occupied locales, the belief for its supporters at the time was that nation-building was a new and morally-superior approach to the issue of advancing the Third World. Several of the more historically prominent moments of tumult to be sparked by the Cold War held to suggest in retrospect that moral differentiation between colonialism and nation-building is baseless. Indeed, the victims of both American and Russian occupation would suffer immensely, experiencing the regression and devastation of foreign aggression and war with little means for self-directed defense. In Chapter 5, the author calls to conversation the issues of Cuba and Vietnam, both of which would find themselves of geographical relevance to the philosophical and strategic positioning of opposing worldviews. Outcomes would include the standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- which to date represents perhaps the closest that we as a global community have come since World War II to deploying nuclear weaponry -- and the quagmire of Vietnam, which is a war that clearly produced no victors. In both instances, it would become quite clear that the ambitions of the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. would spill out into the sometimes divergent interests of puppet states. Westad notes that 'revolutionary states,' such as "Cuba and Vietnam challenged not only Washington in defense of their revolutions; they also challenged the course set by the Soviet Union for the development of socialism and for Communist interventions abroad." (Westad, 158) This is to indicate that one of the core failures in the premise of Cold War nation-building would be in this idea that the independent wills of nations could be molded by outsiders. Resistance to the pressures from both sides would produce forces in Cuba and Vietnam that would persist independently, with the...
Indeed, "many were inspired by what they considered to be the lessons of the wars in Vietnam and in Cuba, believing that guerilla warfare and mass political mobilization would defeat their enemies, while preparing their societies for the postwar building of a socialist state." (Westad, 207) This would produce that strategy of arming natives with principles and armaments and stimulated widespread civil conflict, wherein the two superpowers battled against one another by proxy and to a minimum of personal human loss. That burden would be shouldered increasingly by the natives in the venues of Africa and Central Asia. It is to this extent that Chapter 7 focuses on the 'intense radicalization' of Third World populations such as those in Arab states. (Westad, 250) Many of these groups, more driven by Islamic theology than socialism, found sympathy from the Soviets in resisting capitalist imperialism. This would demonstrate the manner in which the Cold War would also allow smaller rogue states to act out personal interests. For instance, by endorsing the premise of Soviet rule in the Middle East, many leaders found strong support in their mission to destroy Israel.
His early thesis is that the U.S. was engaged in interventions long before the Cold War "broke out" - and those interventions (including those borne of Manifest Destiny) were based not so much on greed or empire building but on the ideology that all nations should be allowed to enjoy individual liberty, economics based on an open and free market, and social progress. And after WWII, the interventions by
Cold War It is important to note from the onset that the Cold War was not essentially a war that involved conventional military weaponry. It was a war that largely involved the utilization of surrogates, propaganda, and economics -- it was a war of words. In that regard therefore, the Cold War was in basic terms the uneasy relationship that primarily developed between the U.S.S.R. And the U.S.A. after the
" The withdrawal was supposed to aid the Communists in controlling the areas vacated by the Japanese, who had succeeded in controlling vast portions of Manchuria. Stalin's efforts were aimed at forcing "the GMD [Guomindang or Chinese Nationalist Party] to make economic concessions, to prevent a united China from allying with the United States, and to placate Washington on the international arena by giving in to American demands for withdrawal," but in
In that book, which Munoz claims was just a "long interview with a fictitious journalist," Pinochet portrays himself as a life-long "anti-Communist," and he recounts an experience he had as an army officer in Pisagua, a prison where communists were incarcerated. "The more I knew those prisoners and listened to their thoughts, while, at the same time, I studied Marx and Engels, the more I became convinced that we
American history is an exercise in country branding and national identity construction. Through a careful editorializing and curating of historical documents, events, and places, historians contribute to the shaping of American identity, ideology, and culture. Revisiting the process of history making shows how historians and history educators can encourage critical thought, shifting away from the use of historiography as propaganda toward a discursive process. Historians can define and interpret evidence
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