With the completion of hostilities at the end of the Second World War came a new bipolar world. After the Second World War, there no longer existed a group of five or six great powers, there were only two superpowers, followed by some of the former great powers. These two new superpowers were not entirely new to the political landscape. Before the war, the Soviet Union had been through a period of revolution and drastic economic change. By virtue of Stalin’s Five Year Plans, and the sheer size of the Soviet military machine, the U.S.S.R. was now one of the superpowers. The United States, on the other hand, had been an economic superpower since the last century. It was the Second World War that brought it permanently out of isolation.
A defining feature of the Cold War was the division of the world into two sides. Each side would then work tirelessly to win as many countries as possible over to its side. For example, the United States gave a great deal of financial aid to European countries after the Second World War in order to help them rebuild. However, their main aim was to ensure that Europe would grow to depend on and side with the United States rather than the Soviet Union. Additionally, the Soviet Union gave financial and military aid to countries such as Cuba, North Korea, and South Africa, in an effort to win them over to their side. This division of the world also created a system of satellite states which can be thought of as countries that “orbit” the superpower, such as Hungary, Poland, Mongolia and Romania, which bordered the Soviet Union. Some also consider the United States to have had satellite states in some European and Latin American countries. With the world essentially divided into two sides, each formed military alliances. In the West, the alliance was called NATO. In this military pact, all countries involved agreed to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all. In the East, the U.S.S.R. formed a similar alliance, called the Warsaw Pact, with members of its satellite states.
For this assignment, you will be creating an annotated timeline covering important events that occurred during the cold war.
The assignment can be found in the [ File ] link below:
timeline-_cold_war.docx |
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