Lecture 2 history of the united states Part 3. The u.S. In the 20th and 21st centuries
Part 3 covers major events of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. It describes the following events and time periods:
the U.S. in the 1920’s
the U.S. in the 1930’s
World War II and the end of the Great Depression
the U.S. in post-war years
the U.S. in the 21st century
Key Words and Proper Names: allowance, assault, brinksmanship, be sworn in, cash-and-carry plan, casualty, ceasefire, counterinsurgency, deflation, deployment of nuclear missiles, depository, détente, disabilities incurred at work, “dot-com” industries, downsizing, electrocute, federal expenditures, hostility, impeachment, internee, the installment plan, military draft, nonviolent protest sit-ins, overdue, perjury, the pillars of economic growth, policy of containment of communism behind the iron curtain, the policy of massive retaliation, ragtag army, relief program, relocation center, social security system, stance, surplus, welfare state;
the Cuban Missile Crisis, the League of Nations, Marshall Plan, McCarthyism, Monroe Doctrine, Roaring Twenties, Iron Curtain, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), Truman Doctrine, United Nations Charter, Watergate scandal.
World War I: When World War I began in 1914, the U.S. firmly maintained neutrality. The pretext to enter the war was found when the RMS Lusitania (May 1915), a British ship carrying many American passengers, was sunk by a German submarine. But the U.S. Congress did not hurry; it declared war on Germany only on April 6, 1917.
The U.S. casualties in WWI were 112,000 people and mainly to diseases including influenza. The war ended in October 1918 when Germany asked for peace.
Interesting to know: During WWI a very famous recruitment poster depicted America's National symbol of Uncle Sam pointing at the viewer with the words "I WANT YOU” appearing below.
Uncle Sam is a national personification of the U.S. Its origin can be traced back to soldiers stationed in New York state during the War of 1812, they used to receive barrels of meat stamped with the initials U.S. The soldiers jokingly referred to U.S. as the initials of their meat supplier, Uncle Samuel Wilson, of city Troy, New York. The 87th U.S. Congress adopted the following resolution on September 15, 1961: “Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives that the Congress salutes Uncle Sam Wilson of Troy, New York, as the progenitor (originator) of America's National symbol of Uncle Sam”.
Fig. 8. U.S. recruitment poster
In 1918, a peace conference was held in France. President Wilson helped draft the peace treaty and offered a plan for a world organization to help prevent another war. The organization was called the League of Nations. But Congress refused to let the U.S. join the League as it supported the idea of not getting involved in new European quarrels, in other words, the U.S. chose to pursue unilateralism, non-involvement and isolationism.
In fact, Woodrow Wilson was a tragic wartime president who led his country to victory but could not hold the support of his people for the peace that followed. His fate was later shared by British Prime minister W. Churchill in 1945.
The war changed American mentality; the U.S. withdrew from European affairs. The American people chose isolationism: they turned their attention away from international relations and solely toward domestic affairs. Disillusioned by the war, soldiers returned home. A popular song of 1919 asked, concerning the U.S. troops returning from World War I, “How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On the Farm After They've Seen Paree?” Many of these retirees did not remain “down on the farm,” because there was a great migration of formerly rural population to the cities.
The aftershock of the October Revolution resulted in real fears of communism in the U.S. Americans became hostile to foreigners. In 1919, a series of terrorist bombings produced a three-year "Red Scare." Under the government authority, political meetings were raided and several hundred foreign-born political radicals were deported, even though most of them were innocent of any crime. In 1921, two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolommeo Vanzetti, were convicted of a murder on the basis of shaky evidence. Many people, mostly intellectuals protested, but in 1927 the two men were electrocuted.
Congress enacted immigration limits in 1921 and tightened them further in 1924 and 1929.
The Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization, attracted new followers and terrorized blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.
The Roaring Twenties: The 1920’s or the Roaring Twenties were an extraordinary and confusing time, when hedonism coexisted with puritanical conservatism. It was the age of Prohibition: as in 1920 the 18th Constitutional Amendment outlawed the sale of alcoholic beverages. Gangsters carried machine guns; they organized bootlegging - illegal supply of alcohol from Canada and elsewhere.
It was the age of jazz and spectacular silent movies, the age of girls dancing the Charleston, Charlie Chaplin playing comical tricks.
For big business, the 1920’s were golden years. The U.S. was now a consumer society, with booming markets for radios, home appliances, synthetic textiles, and plastics. Between 1919 and 1929, mass-production factories doubled their output.
In the 1920’s, America became a nation on wheels. It seemed as if every family were buying a car. One of the most admired men of the decade was Henry Ford, who had introduced the assembly line into automobile factories. Ford could pay high wages and still earn enormous profits by mass-producing the Model T, a car that millions of buyers could afford.
Buying durable goods on the installment plan was a new idea in American business. The installment plan made it possible for people to “own” cars before they really owned them.
It had a good effect on business because more people were able to buy expensive things. Suburbs, towns and neighborhoods lying around bid cities, began to grow fast. In the 1920’s, the nation became increasingly urban, and everyday life was transformed as the "consumer revolution" brought the ever growing use of automobiles, telephones, radios, and other appliances. The pace of living quickened, and morals became less restrained. At this time, fortunes were rapidly accumulated on the skyrocketing stock market, in real estate speculation, and elsewhere. For a moment, it seemed that Americans had the Midas touch. To some it seemed a golden age. But agriculture was not prosperous, and industry and finance became dangerously over-extended.
The superficial prosperity masked deep problems. With profits soaring and interest rates low, plenty of money was available for investment. Much of it, however, went into reckless speculations in the stock market. Stock shares’ prices were far above their real value. Investors bought stocks “on margin” (с уплатой только части стоимости ценных бумаг), borrowing up to 90% of the purchase price. The inflated stock market led to the crash of Thursday, October 29, 1929. The bubble burst. And the stock market crashed and the Roaring Twenties ended in deadly convulsions.
U.S. in the 1930’s: The Great Depression was a period of American history that followed "Black Thursday", October 29, 1929.
The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, collapsing farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Unlike unemployed workers in Germany and France, Americans received no government unemployment pay. Millions spent hours and days in “breadlines”. The net effect of the Great Depression was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future.
The usual explanations of the Great Depression include numerous factors: especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, the lack of high-growth in new industries, and growing wealth inequality - all interacting to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence, and lowered production.
In the U.S. between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from 3% of the workforce to 25%. It means that one out of every four workers was unemployed.
By 1932, thousands of American banks and over 100,000 businesses had failed. Industrial production was cut in half, wages decreased 60%. With millions unemployed, the political ferment and discontent increased greatly among the working class.
And an unsympathetic, improper or repressive response from the U.S. government might well have sparked a socialist uprising. By March 1933, there had been 13 milion unemployed, and almost every bank had been closed.
In November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President on the platform of “a New Deal for the American people,” a phrase that served as a label for his administration and its many domestic achievements.
His main idea was that the federal government should take the lead in the fight against the Depression. Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. This New Deal was often contradicting, pragmatic, and experimental.
But Roosevelt’s self-confidence galvanized the nation. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, he said at his inauguration smiling. He followed up these words with decisive actions. Within 3 months - the historic “Hundred Days” - Roosevelt rushed through Congress a great number of laws to help the economy rebound (recover).
The New Deal consisted of three types of programs (3 R’s programs) designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform". He proposed and the Congress enacted a sweeping program called the New Deal to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through policies of greater government action. Roosevelt implemented a number of programs to aid the poor and unemployed. He contributed to the future stability of the economy by instituting new regulations in business, particularly banking.
Recover and relief measures: Many of the new laws set up government agencies called “alphabet agencies” to help the nation to recover from the depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) found work for many thousands of young unemployed people, they lived in camps and built roads, bridges, airports, parks, and public buildings, planted trees, strengthened river banks for food and $1 a day. The Federal Emergency Relief Organization (FERA) gave individual states government money to help their unemployed and homeless. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) paid farmers to produce less; the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built a network of dams to make electricity and stop floods in a poor southeastern region of the U.S. And the National Recovery Administration (NRA) worked to make sure that businesses paid fair wages and charged fair prices. The Works Progress Administration set people to work on jobs useful to the community. These alphabet agencies put millions of people to work. Between 1935 and 1940, the WPA alone provided 8 ml jobs.
Reform measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) – dealing with regulation for industry, the Securities Exchange Act (SEA) - dealing with regulation of Wall Street, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) – devoted to implementation of farm programs, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) - devoted to insurance for bank deposits, and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) - dealing with labor-management relations. In 1935, the Social Security Act set up contributory old-age and survivors’ pensions and first American system of unemployment insurance.
FDR’s critics accused him of turning America into a socialist state. It was not true, for Roosevelt opposed socialism in the sense of state ownership of the means of production, his only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of production.
The New Deal reflected the ideas and was influenced by the programs, that Franklin D. Roosevelt and most of his original associates had absorbed in their political youths early in the progressive era, while serving in the Woodrow Wilson administration or holding other offices in the 1920’s. From the progressive era, the New Dealers borrowed the opposition to monopoly, move toward government regulation of the economy, and put an end to age-long notions that poverty was a personal moral failure rather than a product of impersonal social and economic forces. From the Wilson administration, the ideas about government mobilization which helped mobilize the economy for the Great War. And from the policy experiments of the 1920’s, New Dealers picked up the ideas to harmonize the economy by creating cooperative relationships among its constituent elements.
But, perhaps the strongest legacy of the New Deal was to make the federal government a protector of interest groups and a supervisor of competition among them.
As a result of the New Deal, American political and economic life became much more competitive than before, now workers, farmers, consumers, and others were able to press their demands upon the government in ways that in the past had been available only to the corporate world.
The New Deal created the rudiments of the American welfare state, through its many relief programs and above all through the Social Security system. Roosevelt’s boiling public personality, and his “fireside chats” on the radio did a great deal alone to help restore the nation’s confidence.
The New Deal did not transform American capitalism in any genuinely radical way. Corporate power remained nearly as free from government regulation or control in 1945 as it was in 1933.
To his credit, Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to second-level positions in his administration, perhaps due to the influence of his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, a vocal advocate of easing discrimination. And African Americans did benefit in significant though limited ways from New Deal relief programs. The New Deal established a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that survives to this day.
New Deal programs stimulated demand and provided work and relief for the impoverished through the increased government spending. In 1929, federal expenditures were only 3% of the GDP. Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled. However, spending on the New Deal was far smaller than on the war effort. During the war, federal expenditures went from 3% of the GDP in 1929 to about 30% in 1946 and amounted to $62 billion. In short, spending and government regulation cured the depression. Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation’s output almost doubled.
Consequently, unemployment fell by two-thirds in Roosevelt's first term (from 25% to 9%, from 1933 to 1937), then from 14% in 1940 to less than 2% in 1943 as the labor force grew by ten million. As you see, unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years; consumption, investment, and net exports - the pillars of economic growth - remained low.
It was World War II, not the New Deal that finally ended the crisis. In 1941, FDR said and his “fireside chat” on the radio “Old Dr. New Deal has to be replaced by Dr. Win-the-War.” His New Deal was over.
30 years later one old American man expressed in his simple words how many Americans felt about FDR in those years. “Roosevelt?” he said in his television interview. “He was God in this country”. Even so, it was not FDR’s New Deal that ended unemployment in the U.S. It was the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, who did that.
Roosevelt and U.S. foreign policy: In the 1920’s and 1930’s, isolationist sentiment in America was very strong. But as the war spread abroad, Americans increasingly doubted if the U.S. could avoid becoming involved. In September 1939, Roosevelt called Congress to revise the neutrality acts and legitimize a cash-and-carry program that allowed Britain and France to buy American arms. In June 1940, the U.S. started supplying Britain with military aid in order to help the British defend themselves against Germany.
After the 1940 election, Roosevelt urged that the U.S. become “the great arsenal of democracy.” In 1941, he and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced the Atlantic Charter, which set forth Allied goals for WWII and the postwar period.
War economy: WWII brought the U.S. economy to life. Industry quickly shifted to war production, automakers began turning out tanks and planes, and the U.S. became the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. New industries emerged. The war economy brought full employment, longer work weeks, and (despite wage controls) higher earnings.
Farmers prospered, too. Farm income tripled. Labor scarcity drew women into the war economy. More than 6 million women entered the work force in wartime; women’s share of the labor force leaped from 25% in 1940 to 35% in 1945.
Members of minorities, who were out of jobs in the 1930’s, also found work in the war economy. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated from the South to Northern industrial cities to work in war industries. More than 1 million black people served in the armed forces.
The war economy was not so much a triumph of free enterprise as the result of government/business sectionalism, of government’s financing business.
WWII greatly increased the power of the federal government, which grew both in size and power. The federal budget skyrocketed, and the number of federal civilian employees tripled. The war made the U.S. a military and economic world power. For all Americans, war changed the quality of life. WWII inspired hard work, cooperation, and patriotism.
In the U.S., civil liberties, however, were casualties of the war. In February 1942, the president authorized the evacuation of all Japanese from the West Coast. The U.S. government interned around 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them native-born U.S. citizens, in relocation centers. Forced to sell their land and homes, the West Coast internees ended up behind barbed wire in remote western areas. In 1988, Congress apologized and voted to pay $20,000 compensation to each of 60,000 surviving internees.
On December 7, 1941, Japanese airplanes attacked an American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,388 persons, sank 8 ships, and damaged nearly 350 airplanes. This was the largest single-day loss in the U.S. Navy history.
This attack brought the U.S. into WW II, and Congress declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy. Although the main theatre of the war was in Europe, where the U.S. provided help to Great Britain and the allies, the American Navy obtained several victories against the Japanese in 1942-1945 gradually reconquering one island after another in the Pacific.
The cost of the war worldwide was immense. Approximately 57 million people died as a result of the war, including acts of genocide such as the Holocaust. Allied military and civilian losses were 44 million; those of the Axis-11 million. The USSR alone lost more than 20 million people. The U.S. lost almost 300,000 people in battle deaths, which was far less than the toll in Europe and Asia; furthermore, there had been no fighting or bombing in North America. So, the U.S. was in much better shape than the war-torn countries.
The United Nations (U.N.) was formed at the end of WWII. Most of the world nations joined it. The U.S. Senate, on December 4, 1945, approved the U.S. participation in the U.N., which marked a turn away from the traditionalisolationism of the U.S. and toward more international involvement.
Cold War: The post-war era was marked by the beginning of the Cold War, in which the U.S. and the USSR attempted to expand their influence at the expense of the others. They bitterly disagreed over the further world order and post war spheres of influence and control. The contest in new types of weapons and new forms of using them known as the arms race alongside with persistent hostility between the Western and Communist nations defined the life of the post-war world from 1946 till 1991.
The start of the cold war policy is attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who in his 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri first mentioned the term “iron curtain”. This term described the line separating eastern European nations under the Soviet control from the western countries controlled by the U.S. and its allies after WWII.
The cold war landmarks were the policy of the iron curtain, or the Truman Doctrine (U.S. President in 1945-1953) aimed at helping Europe to resist Communist influence and contain communism; the Marshall Plan, devised by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947, in which the U.S. gave or loaned billions of dollars to various European countries, particularly Germany, to assist in postwar reconstruction of their industries.
The widespread fear of Communism was one of the reasons behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. The same fear, during the 1950’s, brought to life the political phenomenon of McCarthyism; discrediting people without proof. Those accused of being pro-Communists usually lost their jobs and found it very difficult or impossible to get new ones.
The F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) was the axis of political and war strategies machine of the U.S.A. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (former CIA chief) was the dominant figure in the U.S. foreign policy in the 1950’s. He denounced the policy of “containment of communism behind the iron curtain” pursued by the Truman administration and introduced an active program of “liberation,” which would lead to a “rollback” of communism. Another name of this doctrine was the policy of “massive retaliation” (here revenge), which Dulles announced early in 1954 in view of the U.S. vast superiority in nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence. Dulles defined this approach as “brinksmanship” or confrontation.
Numerous political and armed incidents and war actions throughout the post-war world for spheres of influence increased international tension and the possibility of another global conflict. They were the wars in North Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1960-1973), the support of France in their Indochina War (1946-1954), the Soviet-American conflict in Cuba (1962).
In fact, the Cold War reached its height during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the U.S. over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The crisis began on October 16, 1962 and lasted for 14 days. It is regarded by many as the moment when the cold war was closest to becoming a nuclear war.
By 1965, the U.S. had been spending huge amounts of money on the war, with large numbers of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. The Vietnam War became the subject of heated argument among the American people. Many people held big demonstrations to protest the war. Young Americans used to cross the Canadian border and stay in Canada in their attempts to evade the draft. Finally, in 1973, the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam War. Around 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed in the war and around 58,000 U.S. soldiers died.
End of Cold War: With Reagan’s promises to restore the nation’s military strength, the 1980’s saw massive increases in U.S. military spending, amounting to about $1.6 trillion over five years. The Reagan administration was very active in the Third World arena of superpower competition. The administration backed the relatively cheap strategy of specially trained counter insurgencies or “low-intensity conflicts” rather than large-scale ground wars like those in Vietnam and Korea. The administration financed training of mujahedeens and other insurgent groups under Osama bin Laden’s control.
The U.S. participated in the war in Lebanon, invaded Grenada, attacked Libya, supplied funds and weapons to governments in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, etc.
The Reagan administration also adopted a hawkish approach toward the USSR. In his first term, Reagan called the Soviet superpower as the “evil empire.” In the early 1980’s, East-West tensions reached the levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A new arms race developed as the Soviet-American relations deteriorated. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star War initiative) was born at that time.
However, East-West tensions eased rapidly thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev. He understood that the U.S. made the arms race a huge burden for the USSR. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the U.S.-Soviet Cold War.
Political scandals: In the post-war period, Americans’ belief in the nation’s political institutions was shaken by a series of scandals. The most serious of these became known as the Watergate scandal, when prominent members of the Republican Party were found guilty of ‘bugging’ the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters (at the Watergate Hotel building). The scandal completely overshadowed President Nixon’s policy of détente achievements while in office, such as the normalization of relations with China and the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union in 1972.
Facing sure impeachment for reasons of perjury, misuse of federal funds, and politicization of federal agencies, Nixon was forced to resign the Presidency in 1974.
The Iran-Contra scandal (November 1986) was as deeply disturbing as Watergate. The reason of it was the following: the Reagan administration, in its desire to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, illegally sold arms to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. The received money was then used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. The deal became public, but President Reagan was not impeached as all the blame was attributed to Colonel Oliver North.
In 1998, Clinton was impeached for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice that arose from his lies about his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He was the second president after Richard Nixon to have been impeached. The House of Representatives voted 228 to 206 on December 19 to impeach Clinton, but on February 12, 1999, the Senate voted 55 to 45 to acquit Clinton of the charges.
This sex scandal shook the foundations of American Puritanism and broke the myth of the U.S. President’s supremacy, high morale and honesty.
Civil rights: The issue that dominated American local politics in the 1950’s and 1960’s was civil rights. Numerous Presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) attempted to improve the situation of black people and other minorities in American society. The civil rights movement gained strength in the 1950’s. In the mid-1960’s, non-violent civil rights mass demonstrations often turned into violent clashes, as the militant Black Panther movements replaced the non-violent organizations. The situation improved when in the 1960’s Congress passed laws making segregation and job discrimination illegal, and strengthening voting rights.
Martin Luther King’s dream of true equality for all came true. Now to judge people by the color of their skin became truly illegal.
Economic achievements: Between 1945 and 1970, the U.S. enjoyed a long period of economic growth, interrupted only by mild and brief recessions. This period was called by many historians as “a chicken in every pot” time. A majority of Americans enjoyed a comfortable standard of living. At the center of middle-class culture in the 1950’s was a growing obsession with consumer goods. In 1960, 55% of all households owned washing machines, 77% owned cars, 90% had television sets, and nearly all had refrigerators.
The suburbs grew. William Levitt began a national project using mass-production techniques to construct a large “Levittown” housing development on Long Island. The suburban population grew due to the baby boom and constituted one third of all population in the 1960’s; U.S. auto-manufacturers in Detroit responded to the boom with new car models. Though most suburbs were restricted to whites, a few affluent African Americans could afford to live in them.
During President Lyndon Johnson’s (1963-1969) “War on Poverty,” many assistance programs for individuals and families were implemented: including Medicare, which pays for many medical costs of the elderly, the Medicaid program, which finances medical care for low-income families, Food Stamps to help poor families obtain food. President Johnson wanted to turn the U.S. into “the great society” where everyone received fair and decent treatment. But he himself caused his plans to fail by involving the country more and more deeply in war in Vietnam.
Stagflation: The 1970’s were ridiculed as the period of stagflation. The world oil shock of 1973 resulted in the energy crisis, unemployment, and inflation, and led to the U.S. steadily declining supremacy in international trade because of the growing competition from European and 3d World countries. Inflation continued to climb skyward. The U.S. developed a trade deficit. Productivity growth was pitiful, when not negative. Interest rates remained high reaching 20% in January 1981. Art Buchwald, a world famous caricaturist, wrote that 1980 would go down in history as the year when it was cheaper to borrow money from the Mafia than the local bank.
Reaganomics: In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan began with a series of cuts in taxes and spending. Reagan downsized government regulation. The unemployment rate decreased from 10.8% in December 1982 to 7.5% in November 1984, and the economic growth rate increased from 4.5 to 7.2%.
Reagan’s policies of spending on weapons helped more people find jobs. Businessmen made bigger profits. Most Americans became better off. This made Reagan popular. He was popular for another reason, too. After the shame of Vietnam and Watergate his simple ‘stand on your feet and act tough” policies made many Americans feel proud of their country again.
But during the Reagan Administration the federal debt tripled (from $930 billion on December 31, 1981 to $2.6 trillion on September 30, 1988), reaching record levels. In addition to the fiscal deficits, the U.S. started to have large trade deficits. The U.S. went from being the world’s largest creditor nation to becoming the world’s largest debtor nation.
His successor and his Vice President for 8 years, George H. W. Bush, easily won election in 1988. His early economic policies were a continuation of Reagan’s foreign and home policies. When Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990, Bush put together a multinational coalition that liberated Kuwait early in 1991. However, later on, Bush lost many of Reagan supporters and ended his presidency on a moderate note, signing regulatory bills like the Americans with Disabilities Act and a law mandating that toilets use low amounts of water.
“Globalization and the new economy of the Tech Bubble:” The federal budget was balanced for the first time since the 1960’s under the Clinton Administration, mainly due to massive investment in the stock market in the 1990’s, it was further accelerated by the dot-com boom. The 1990’s saw a significant boost in the software and “dot-com” industries. The Internet project was opened up for commercial traffic in 1994.
During this period, government statistical formulas were changed to produce happier results; therefore government statistics should be studied carefully before being accepted.
Two phenomena troubled many Americans and many name them as the root reasons of the 2008-2009 recession. Corporations resorted more and more to processes known as downsizing: trimming the work force to cut costs despite the hardships it inflicted on workers and outsourcing. And in many industries the gap between the annual compensations of corporate executives and common laborers became enormous.
George W. Bush Administration was marked by dreadful attacks of Islamic terrorists on 9/11th 2001, the invasion in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Many American allies including France, Germany, and Canada, the U.N. Security Council as well as millions of people within the U.S. and around the world, did not support the invasion in Iraq.
Later that year, President Bush announced his Doctrine or his War on terror and stated that the U.S. would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”. His political Doctrine can be summed up as, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
The Bush Doctrine contains the following ideas which may have far-reaching and dangerous consequences as:
a) A policy of pre-emptive war, if the U.S. or its allies are threatened by terrorists or by rogue states (государства – изгои) engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction. So, the right of self-defense can authorize pre-emptive attacks against potential aggressors before they are able to launch strikes against the U.S.
b) Unilateralism. The right of the U.S. to pursue a unilateral military action when acceptable multi-lateral solutions cannot be found.
c) Strength beyond challenge. The policy that “U.S. has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge,” indicated the U.S. desire to continue maintaining its status as the world's sole military superpower. This resembles a British Empire policy before WW I that the Royal navy must be larger than the world’s next two largest navies put together.
American invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq ignited Moslem “anti-Americanism” and inspired insurgency movements and a real civil war between the 3 main population groups belonging to different branches of Islam: Sunni, Shiites and Curds who are fighting against each other and Western instructors still left in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A vast majority in Muslim nations believe that the U.S. is arrogant, hostile and hateful to Islam. In fact, the U.S. got trapped in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, this Taliban-bound triangle.
In 2013, Sunni jihadist groups united and created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate, it claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring most of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control beginning with Iraq, Syria and other territories in the Levant region which include Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and part of southern Turkey. It has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, and has been described by the United Nations .The U.N. and Amnesty International have accused the group of grave human rights abuses.
On 29 June 2014, the establishment of a new caliphate was announced, and the group formally changed its name to the "Islamic State". In late August 2014, a leading Islamic authority Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah in Egypt advised Muslims to stop calling the group "Islamic State" and instead refer to it as "Al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria" or "QSIS", due to the militant group's un-Islamic character.
The incumbent U.S. President Barack H. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were sworn in on January 20, 2009.
Barack Obama came to office in such difficult circumstances as no one of U.S. presidents since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He started, as did FDR, with an enormous stock of political capital. U.S. people understood that the challenges President Obama faced were not of his own making.
People all over the world believed in Obama that he would be able to improve the image of the U.S., release the country from the failures of the Bush administration and retain the respect of the country, on the one hand, and pacify the whole world, on the other hand.
However, the beginning of his presidency was marked by a severe economic recession of 2008 called ‘credit crunch’ resulting from a housing market bubble, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, military spending and a declining dollar value. It was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In November 2008, over 500,000 jobs were lost, which marked the largest loss of jobs in the U.S. in 34 years. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 10% in 2009 against the unemployment rate of 6.1% in September 2014.
Like FDR, President Obama started with his 3 R’s program called Change, also including Relief, Recovery and Reform, aimed at helping the economy recover from the worldwide recession. The program included increased federal spending for health care, infrastructure, automobile industry, education, various tax breaks andincentives, and direct assistance to individuals, distributed over the course of several years. The Obama administration also enacted economic programs designed to stimulate the economy.
In 2014, the economic situation in the U.S. normalized.
Early in his presidency, Obama promised to change the U.S. war strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The combat troops had been withdrawn from Iraq by September 1, 2010. But the amount of troops in Afghanistan was increased by 17,000. Next year Americans are planning to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. But nowadays the threat coming from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) makes the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria unpredictable.
In foreign policy, the U.S. maintained talks over a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as a result the relations with Israel temporarily worsened.
Another much spoken about achievement was the assassination of Osama bin Laden.
The U.S. relaunched or reset bilateral relations with Russia. The hallmarks of this reset policy were the general improvement of the atmosphere, the 2010 New START treaty, cooperation on sanctions against the Iranian nuclear program, the supply route through Russia for NATO forces in Afghanistan, Russian abstention during the UN Security Council vote on Libya. Unfortunately, the reset failed to generate a sustained cooperation. The current military crisis in southeastern Ukraine and the U.S. policy of financial and economic sanctions against Russia have thrown the bilateral relations back almost to the cold war times.
In Dec. 2009, a year after the election, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It could be viewed as a rejection of the unpopular legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But normally the Nobel Prize is presented for accomplishment, but this prize was based only on good intentions.
In his lecture in Stockholm before the Norwegian Nobel Committee President Obama said, that he would “accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century.”
And the whole world was full of hope for a better and safer future. But our expectations ended on March 20, 2011 with the U.S. and West-European bombs falling on Libya. The year of 2011 brought conflicts in Yemen, Egypt, 2012-13 in Syria, in 2014 in North Iraq. These are “Obama’s extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” aren’t they?
With these extraordinary efforts at hand President Obama and his predecessors and followers are laughing at us and at the whole world.