Which of the following best describes how entering into extensive alliances during the cold war was both helpful and dangerous for the united states?
Answers
The Royal Navy was now much stronger than it had been when it was defeated by the French at the Battle of the Virginia Capes in 1781, the action that had precipitated Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, thus ending the War of Independence. Washington, well aware of Britain’s renewed naval strength, refused to see American trade ravaged and U.S. ports set ablaze.
Unlike Madison, who when President launched the War of 1812
While it is conceivable that U.S. protection might be extended to some countries on this list if they were attacked, there is no guarantee that any military measures would be forthcoming. The standing of some is particularly problematic: Pakistan, for example, which is still linked to the U.S. by the 1954 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement but has moved closer to China (while the U.S. has moved closer to Pakistan’s rival, India), and Saudi Arabia, with which the U.S. has close ties but no formal alliance.
The most problematic relationship of all is with Taiwan. U.S. government intentions toward Taiwan have been mired in uncertainty ever since diplomatic recognition was switched from the Republic of China (ROC) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Post–Cold War Changes
Two trends characterize the period since the fall of the Soviet Union:
NATO’s enlargement and search for a new raison d’etre and
The preference for “coalitions of the willing.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 triggered a wave of popular uprisings that drove Communist regimes from power across Central and Eastern Europe, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in December 1991. Even before the final collapse occurred, NATO’s counterpart in the East, the Warsaw Pact, had disbanded itself at a ministerial meeting held in Budapest in February 1991.
Historically, when a threat disappears, the military alliance assembled to confront it folds its tent and leaves. Instead, and almost instinctively, all of NATO’s member governments felt that the alliance should continue without, as Stanley Sloan put it, being “fully agreed as to why.”35
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Some officials argued that it was more than a military alliance: It was a community of values transcending any specific military threat. Others were more specific, suggesting that although the Soviet Union was going through its death throes and the Russia that was reemerging appeared to be moving closer to the West, this could change, and Russia could adopt a threatening posture in the future. Finally, and most broadly, NATO was a source of stability. The investment that had been made in physical infrastructure and the pooling of organizational and cooperative experience was too good an insurance policy against future threats to European security to let go.
However, events in the 1990s unsettled alliance relations.
The first event was NATO’s initial post–Cold War Strategic Concept. Issued in 1991, it emphasized a broader approach to security. In effect, the alliance now needed to manage not one but two core missions: collective defense and “out of area” security tasks ranging from crisis response to military-to-military engagement, which together were more complex militarily and diverse politically than its previously singular Cold War purpose.36
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The second, enlargement of the alliance by the admission of previously Warsaw Pact powers, was a source of contention from the very beginning. While it removed the stain of Yalta, the U.S. was concerned that it would strengthen nationalist factions in Russia that were already suspicious of Western intentions.37
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These reservations were to be borne out when Russia invaded Crimea and the Ukraine in 2014. In addition, the populations of Central and Eastern Europe that had direct experience of Communist and Russian rule were adamantly opposed to the idea that Russia was entitled to absorb them into a sphere of influence simply to appease its own historic sense of insecurity and great-power entitlement.
The third was the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo that gave the world the term “ethnic cleansing” as Croats and particularly Serbs used violence to disaggregate ethnically mixed communities with the aim of creating ethnically homogeneous and contiguous areas. Although both conflicts were precisely the type that NATO’s new strategy was intended to defuse, failures in the alliance’s performance on the ground—particularly its inability to prevent the genocide committed at Srebrenica in 1995—pushed America to implement a bombing campaign that drove the warring factions to sign the Dayton Accords by the year’s end.38
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Differences between Europeans and Americans, particularly over the Balkan wars, became so acute that, Lawrence Kaplan suggests, the sides drew as far apart as they had been during the Suez–Hungarian Uprising crises of 1956.39
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