Key Terms 1
Formed in 1949, this mutual-defense alliance united Western nations to provide collective security against the threat of Soviet aggression.
What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)?
This 1950–1953 conflict pitted a Soviet-backed northern state against a U.S.-backed southern state, effectively drawing the hot lines of containment in East Asia.
What is the Korean War?
This harrowing 13-day diplomatic and military standoff in October 1962 brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the absolute brink of global thermonuclear war over secret installations in the Caribbean.
What is the Cuban Missile Crisis?
This island nation, located just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, became a central flashpoint of the Global Cold War after its 1959 revolution led to a strict alliance with the Soviet Union. (proxy warfare)
What is Cuba?
The physical destruction of this iconic European barrier in November 1989 symbolized the dramatic collapse of communist control across Eastern Europe.
What is the Berlin Wall?
This psychological term describes the widespread post-WWII public anxiety and awareness of total annihilation brought on by the atomic arms race
What is nuclear consciousness?
Translating loosely to "truth-force" or "soul-force," this is Gandhi's specific philosophical framework for non-violent, passive resistance.
What is satyagraha?
This intelligence term describes the unintended, hidden, and often violent domestic consequences suffered by a nation as a result of its past covert foreign interventions.
What is blowback?
The Truman Doctrine was originally formulated in 1947 specifically to provide urgent military and economic assistance to Turkey and this Mediterranean nation to prevent a communist takeover.
What is Greece?
This European capital city experienced a massive wave of student protests and wildcat workers' strikes in May 1968 that nearly paralyzed the entire country's government.
What is Paris?
He spearheaded the Indian National Congress and utilized mass civil disobedience to end British colonial rule in India by 1947.
Who is Mohandas Gandhi?
This communist revolutionary and nationalist leader successfully defeated French colonial forces and led North Vietnam during the resulting war against U.S. military intervention.
Who is Ho Chi Minh?
Mikhail Gorbachev introduced this policy of political "openness" in the late 1980s, which unexpectedly unleashed years of repressed free speech and press across the USSR.
What is glasnost?
In 1973, Chile experienced a violent, bloody coup that overthrew the democratically elected Marxist leader Salvador Allende and installed this brutal military dictator.
Who is Augusto Pinochet?
Upon gaining independence from British rule in 1947, the Indian subcontinent was violently split into two separate, independent nations based on religious majorities—India and this new state.
What is Pakistan?
Introduced in 1947, this U.S. foreign policy doctrine pledged military and economic aid to nations like Greece and Turkey resisting communist subjugation, establishing the baseline strategy of containment.
What is the Truman Doctrine?
This 1955 historic summit brought together 29 newly independent Asian and African states to promote economic cooperation and reject alignment with both Cold War superpowers.
What is the Bandung Conference?
Meaning "restructuring," this late-1980s Soviet policy aimed to decentralize economic controls and allow minor market reforms to save a stagnant system.
What is perestroika?
The Ba'ath Party leader Saddam Hussein initiated a catastrophic eight-year war from 1980 to 1988 against this neighboring Islamic Republic following its recent religious revolution.
What is Iran?
During China's Cultural Revolution, millions of high school and university students formed these aggressive paramilitary groups to attack traditional culture and purge perceived bourgeois elements.
Who are the Red Guards?
This massive post-WWII American economic initiative pumped billions into rebuilding Western European infrastructures to stabilize democratic governments and halt communist expansion.
What is the Marshall Plan?
This covert operation, orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized the country's oil industry.
What is the 1953 coup in Iran?
This Martinican author's foundational post-colonial text harshly critiques European imperialism, arguing that colonialism fundamentally brutalizes and dehumanizes the colonizer as well as the colonized.
What is Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism?
This radical Islamist group seized control of Kabul in 1996 during the Afghan Civil War, establishing a fundamentalist regime that later provided safe haven to Al Qaeda.
Who are the Taliban?
Aime Cesaire’s influential post-colonial critique argued that European colonization did not civilize people, but rather served to "thingify" and exploit inhabitants of this continent.
What is Africa? (Alternatively: What is the Global South / Third World?)