Cold War Dbq Analysis

For instance, the strategic position of countries has been behind foreign policy decisions taken by the United States. Let’s go back to the Cold War, when tensions between NATO and the USSR where incredibly strong and the world was threatened by a nuclear-bomb war. During this period of time, the United States was part of a group of western allies called the NATO, which was supposedly interested only in winning the war against communism. To win the war both the NATO and the USSR established military bases near both Russia and The United States. Even thought NATOS’s interest was only winning the war, the United States’ wasn’t. The United States had national defense interests for resource possession, especially ones with great significance or uniqueness for the Cold War.
Zinn explains that the US was involved in the French-Vietnamese conflict because the area of Indochina was immensely wealthy in rice, rubber, coal and iron ore.
Its position makes a strategic key to the rest of South East Asia, and losing it to communism was something that the US couldn’t afford (Source 2). Zinn explains this in an attempt to make the reader realize that although the United States was interested in winning against communism, it also had interests for resource possession that would bring wealth along with trade to its allies and consequently there would be an input of wealth for it as well. Also, the United States broke Iraq’s sovereignty for allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction, which posed a threat to it. In this case, the strategic position of the United States didn’t involve the economic interests but national defense ones for sure. ProCon.org says, “Legally, the conflict regarding access for United Nations’ inspectors and possible Iraqi procurement of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMDs) had always been between Iraq and the United Nations, not between Iraq and The United States. The United States therefore has no legal right to act on the dispute
unilaterally. Although UN Security Council Resolution 687, which demands, Iraqi disarmament, was not the most detailed in the world body’s history, no military enforcement was included” (Source 3). In this case, the United States broke the sovereignty of a country, which is an act that overestimated the power of the United Nations. Even so, the United States had no punishment of any kind because the power it holds over the United Nations is large enough to ignore it completely. Maybe the power held by the United States has to be restricted, it is a shame that the power it holds is used to abuse international laws at the expense of its own security. In this case, the United Stated didn’t care, not even a bit, about the consequences that its actions would have in Iraq. The conflict was nurtured by doing so! Besides, its unfair to other countries because if the United States doesn’t respond by complying to these laws, the other countries shouldn’t be obligated to comply to the laws that the United States breaks. In general, the United States has shown that it can be an “interested” player in the area of foreign policy. It has also shown that it can “squeeze” itself into conflicts to the point of breaking laws established by the UN and promoting unnecessary wars like the French-Vietnamese one.