Cold Turkey

The integration of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) petrified the Soviet Union and caused them to create their own military and economic alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. Even though it was initially referred to as a Treaty on Friendship, the Soviets became increasingly authoritative in regard to the actions of their so called allies and provided these nations with the impetus to withdraw from the Pact. Two countries that felt the sting of Russian authoritarianism…

control, they fought for the ideas. Democracy and self-determination are the backbones of American identity, so engrained that the US has fought wars thousands of miles of way to spread them to other societies. The Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the Cold War stand as permanent monuments to America’s dedication to democracy as advanced by leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, men whom are all venerated present day. Upholding the American vision of Democracy is…

with Russia, which only included a boycott of their Olympics. Reagan’s approach to foreign policy was to revive the Cold War, as the Soviet Union is an “evil empire”. He also proposed the “Star Wars program” in which missiles would be put in outer space to shoot down Soviet Union missiles. This terrified the Soviet Union, and helped to put on pressure for an eventual end to the Cold War. When George H.W. Bush became president in 1989, he took a not aggressive approach toward foreign policy.…

faced many different complexities. Karl Lowe describes the complexities in the beginning of his essay “Hybrid Warfare in Vietnam”. He talks about how there were many “layers” politically between the different civil wars being fought along with the Cold War implications. He says “With that layering, the war in Vietnam was inherently a hybrid conflict in which state-of-the-art conventional arms and tactics commingled with the tools and techniques of guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare.”…

In the world’s past, dictators and their political systems have done things to solidify their power and to command their citizens. Dictators for example are, Louis XIV of France and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. The work done by these dictators and their political systems had major consequences on their citizens and their countries. Louis the XIV of France exercised the finances of France, increased the size of the French military, and removed the Edict of Nantes from French society to…

In the novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about his experience during the Vietnam War. Many of these stories are what he can or cannot remember. An interesting approach the author takes is whether or not a story has happened or if he imagined what happened and then later on reveals the truth to some of them. As the readers, we may or may never find out if certain stories are true or not which causes the reader to become indulged in the selections of the chapters. Throughout the…

“Over 20 years, more than 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam and more than 150,000 wounded, not to mention the emotional toll the war took on American culture.” (Blake 1 ) In Tim O’Brien’s novel “The Things They Carried” death was a daily occurrence, on both the American and the Vietnamese side. O’Brien writes about the function of memory, traditions of war literature and the difference between Tim as a soldier and Tim as a writer. Tim O 'Brien 's novel “The Things They Carried” is…

darker skin color. Almost a third of these families had to function and live on less than $4,000 a year. While most of the economy boomed and consumerism pervaded the culture, anxiety and tensions belied the surface placidity of 1950s society. In this cold war era, fear of Communist expansion abroad and subversion at home, as well as of nuclear war, shaped American life in profound ways. As the long conflict with the Soviet Union took shape in 1946-1947, American society became increasingly…

Americans were more bound to mold their ideas in order to meet societal standards rather than think for themselves. This was influenced by the domestic Cold War and McCarthyism. Many Americans at that time feared not being conformist therefore they thought as a group. After the war, millions of veterans came home and those women were replaced by men leading to similar roles between men and women. Most…

Gorbachev’s rule was the transition of the Soviet Union into a more democratic state. Through his reforms, Gorbachev revolutionized the political, social, and economic environment in the USSR, indirectly lead to its collapse, and in effect ended of the Cold…