The Arab Oil Embargo
In the 1950s and 1960s, oil supply was not a problem in the United States. As a nation, the U.S. acted as though there was an endless amount of cheap oil and gasoline. Emblematic of this attitude was America’s love affair with high-powered, high-performance, tricked-out, gas guzzling automobiles (“muscle cars”) that generated a whole genre […]
The Camp David Accords
Although American foreign policy recognized the U.S.’s special relationship with Israel, it also acknowledged that peace in the Middle East was essential for international stability. Thus, American diplomatic leaders continually tried to improve relations between the competing sides. Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Egypt’s ( and other Arab nations) foreign policy had been […]
The Iranian Revolution/The Rise of Radical Islam
Iran, known from ancient times as Persia, has a culture that dates back to early biblical times. It is one of the oldest major civilizations in the Middle East, and from time-to-time was an empire of major proportions. Persia was conquered by Islamic forces in the seventh century. The Shia sect is and has been […]
The Persian Gulf War – Operation Desert Storm
Iran and Iraq represent different, hostile strains of the Muslim religion (i.e. the Shiite and Sunni branches) and there have been long-simmering border disputes between the countries. Those facts, plus Arab-Persian cultural differences, make these two countries enemies. Due to hostility stemming from the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis, the United States shifted […]
Reagan’s Central American Foreign Policy
The Monroe Doctrine, which established the American sphere of influence in the Caribbean and Central America, played a significant role in the formation of American foreign policy throughout the 20th century even before John Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, adopted in the […]
Eastern European Nationalistic Protests against the Soviet Union
Although Soviet Russia generally controlled the members of the Warsaw Pact with an iron hand during the Cold War years, there were more than a few instances of significant uprisings (expressions of citizen dissent) in the Warsaw Pact states. One of the first of these occurred in Hungary in October 1956. Hungarian citizens staged a […]
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Ronald Reagan was the ultimate Cold War warrior. He characterized the Soviet Union as “The Evil Empire.” (Jennings and Brewster, p. 479.) His goal was to eliminate communist Russia as an international force. He was fortunate that the USSR contained the seeds of its own destruction. By the 1970s, domestic economic problems were overwhelming Russia. […]
The Balkan Wars of the 1990s
Ethnic disputes in the Balkans have long influenced European history. Remember, it was the action of a Serbian nationalist in assassinating Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 that precipitated World War I. Area intense cultural conflicts were the result of the mixture of many nationalities (Serbians, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Slovenes, Macedonians) plus different religions (Roman […]
Al Qaeda
Following in line with radical Muslim clerics who thought the United States and the West were the source of all evil was a young Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden formed an organization called al Qaeda to advance the causes of radical Islam, the establishment of an Islamic state through Jihad or “holy war” […]
Conclusion
The lyrics for Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” seem like a fitting way to bring this book to a conclusion. Not all of the things listed in the song are referenced in this book, but many of them are. The background for the song is described in Chapter 14 of the book […]