May 8th marked the 70th Anniversary of the formal end to hostilities in Europe. The Americans and the Soviets had linked up, the Russians had taken Berlin, Hitler and many other high-ranking Nazis had offed themselves, and the world was getting ready for peace. Of course, I'm kidding about that last part. The Pacific War was still going strong, and the Cold War was just beginning.
By the end of the war, Stalin was the only remaining member of the original Big Three. Churchill had been voted out of office to be replaced by Clement Attlee, and Roosevelt had suffered his tragic brain hemorrhage. This made things difficult for Stalin, who had planned to take all of Western Europe into the Soviet Bloc. Whereas Roosevelt had been soft on communism, Harry Truman was hard. Truman didn't trust Stalin or the Soviets in the slightest. And while Clement Attlee, Churchill's rival from the Labour Party, didn't share his predecessor's (and, incidentally, his successor's) belief that the Wehrmacht could be used to strike the Russians, he wasn't about to accommodate Stalin's dreams of global conquest. And so we got the Cold War, which shaped the world as we know it today. In theory, it shouldn't impact us to the extent that it does today. The Soviet Union fell, America is the sole remaining superpower, and everything in the world should be fine and dandy. But it isn't, and a lot of that is due to the Cold War, with either the Americans or the Russians to blame.
Take the conflicts in the middle east. Not just Iraq or Afghanistan - the entire region. Israel-Palestine, Iran, Syria...the entire region. Let's look at each one, shall we? The whole schism between Israel and the Arab world, while not caused by the Cold War, attracted its attention. The Soviet Union, which initially favored Israel in the long-standing conflict, sided with the Arab states by the early fifties. And America, of course, backed Israel early on, recognizing its statehood from the late forties onward and eventually supporting it wholeheartedly. For the most part, this was a conflict between the Israelis and the Arabs. The same couldn't be said in Iran's case, where the US did its utmost to keep the anti-communist, pro-American shah in power. This led to the Iranian revolution, which produced the Islamic Republic of Iran that we know and can't make up our minds about today. Ironically enough, the Americans backed the Islamic Republic in the Iran-Iraq War (with the infamous Iran-Contras Affair), whereas the Soviets sided with Saddam's Iraq. And then there's Afghanistan, the big one. The Soviet Union invaded to keep the communist puppet-state that existed there in place. The US backed the rebels known as the Mujahideen, providing them with firearms, surface-to-air missiles, and other weapons. The Mujahideen eventually pushed back the Soviet Union. To call Afghanistan the Soviet Union's Vietnam (where a superpower was embarrassingly defeated by supposedly inferior forces) would be a gross understatement - the conflict in Vietnam utterly destroyed the Red Army's prestige. The Soviet military would never be taken seriously again, what with the concessions made in eastern Europe and the fear of American buildup in the eighties. But the Soviet interference left Afghanistan without a legitimate government, paving the way for the Taliban's takeover in the nineties. Some of the Mujahideen fought with the Taliban, while others fought against them. Whatever side they took, the Taliban would remain in power for a few long years, supporting groups such as Al-Qaeda. And I don't think I need to describe what happened next.
Of course, we also need to consider the mess that was made in Europe. Soviet domination was the only thing that kept the different parts of Yugoslavia together. For those in the younger generation who don't know what Yugoslavia is, it was composed of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia. To put it nicely: once the Soviets were out of the picture, the bull manure hit the rotating blades. This lead to several wars, in which the United Nations and NATO were entangled. And, of course, there's the situation in Ukraine, which is essentially the Cold War reborn. I've discussed it quite a bit - Putin wants Russia to remain relevant, Crimeans and many Ukrainians would like to be part of Russia, the civil war is bloody, and so on. There's more, though. The sentiment towards the rest of the world is different in different parts of Europe - sometimes in different parts of the same country. Take Germany, which was split into east and west after World War Two. The Americans had annihilated much of what became West Germany, while the Russians had obliterated the East. But once the two were split, the Americans rebuilt West Germany under the Marshall Plan, whereas the Russians propped the East back on its feet. As such, the people in western Germany tend to look upon the United States in a more favorable light than their countrymen from the ex-Soviet bloc. Every last foreign policy relation of ours is shaped by the Cold War - our biggest allies are the members of NATO, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and other nations that refused to give into communism. Our rivals (on a national scale) - are Russia, China, North Korea - nations that rested on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Our old enemies, like Saddam Hussein, were on the Soviet payroll. We don't identify nations as our friends and enemies by who they stood with in the great conflicts and battles of the past century - we identify them based on where they stood in the war that wasn't a war. And I'm not sure if that makes me hopeful or concerned.
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