Turning Points of the Twentieth Century

The first half of the Twentieth Century was defined by a savage Thirty Years’ War. The historic empires of Europe were destroyed between 1914 and 1918, but the no durable structure of peace was established to contain Germany and, later, Imperial Japan. Their military expansion in the late 1930s and early 1940s fundamentally threatened the security of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

The turning point in the Second Great War came in 1941-42, when the Nazis were turned back at Moscow and Stalingrad and when the US entered the war, mobilizing its vast reservoirs of industry and manpower.

The basic features of the post-war era were established between 1944 and 1949, when the US and Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons, when the Red Army held the territory it captured in WWII, and when the US chose to take on an active global role, economically and militarily, beginning with the Marshall Plan and NATO.

Those basic structures produced a stable, two-power world, with the United States closely linked to its increasingly prosperous allies by open trade and investment. They lasted until the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991.

Can the cooperative ties among the US, Europe, and northeast Asia, forged in opposition to the Soviet Union, survive and prosper in the post-Cold War environment?