The fundamental issue facing the Europeans was their political and economic alignment in response to the Soviet threat. Protected by NATO forces and reinforced by the nuclear arsenals of the West, the governments of Western Europe were popularly elected democracies or constitutional monarchies. dollars into Europe and Japan to put the war-torn nations back on their feet. 4 The Marshall Plan poured billions of U.S. In the post-War era, Western Europe was divided over the best approach to meet the Soviet threat and on the question of how to deal with the divided Germany. The “Prague Spring” was ruthlessly suppressed by the Soviet Army in 1968. In the 1960s, cracks began to appear in the monolithic Soviet bloc when Alexander Dubček presented a less repressive regime in Czechoslovakia. Mao’s Peoples Republic of China broke with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, resulting in two Communist spheres of influence in the world. 1 Mao Zedong (R) with Associated Press correspondent John Roderick in Yenang China, 1946. It was the Soviet Union that faced off against the West in the Cold War, and instigated such provocations as the erection of the Berlin Wall. The power blocs of the Fifties began to erode in the Sixties. The Allied powers determined at the end of World War II the Security Council’s permanent membership in the newly formed United Nations (Chiang K’ai Shek’s Nationalist China, not Communist China, held a permanent seat). In Latin America, Cuban-sponsored revolutionary fervor was a major factor in determining the U.S. The emphasis will be on Latin America, in particular Bolivia, and events such as Cuban-instigated insurgencies, affecting U.S. This article will look briefly at each of these regions and the general United States foreign policy strategy for each. In the 1960s, this split along ideological and economic lines divided the world into five centers of power: the Soviet Union and its satellites Communist China and Southeast Asia Europe and the United States Africa and Latin America. The post-WWII global configuration was essentially bi-polar, with the United States-led West aligned against the Soviet-dominated East. The decade of the 1960s witnessed profound change in the established world order.
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