hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history now we've been going through unit 8 of the ap u.s history curriculum and in the last few videos we've been taking a break from the larger stage of the international cold war but in this video it's time to get right back to it and talk about america as a world power during this period so if you're ready to get them bring cow's milk well then let's get to it so in this video here's what i'm trying to do explain the various military and diplomatic responses to the international developments of the united states during the cold war easy peasy okay so after world war ii ended there was a massive movement of decolonization throughout the world remember that starting in basically the 16th century europeans have been colonizing essentially the whole dang world and the united states got its big boy empire pants on two after the spanish-american war but after world war ii most of the major empires began to crumble in africa and asia and latin america and i'm not going to go into all the reasons why this happened but for our purposes you need to understand that this wave of decolonization was like a feeding frenzy on shark week for the united states and the soviet union remember that both nations wanted to remake the entire world into the image of either democratic capitalism in the case of the united states or authoritarian communism in the case of the soviet union so as all these nations across the world threw off their imperial rule and established some form of self-governance they began as you might expect with unstable political and economic institutions and since that was the case these new nations needed aid and therefore became desirable and valuable assets in the conflict between the united states and the soviets let me give you some examples and let's start in latin america first guatemala in 1954 the united states led a coup to overthrow a socialist government that was encroaching on u.s business interests the leader of guatemala was a man named jacobo arbenz whom the guatemalans elected to be their leader in 1951 but he turned out to be a little too socialist for the american taste buds because he went ahead and nationalized some of the land on which the american united fruit company grew their bananas now his intent was to nationalize the land that was not under cultivation and distributed to impoverished guatemalans and even he offered to buy the land from the company but they refused enter the cia who trained a force of guatemalan insurgents who overthrew our bends and installed a military dictatorship instead if you think that sounds a little underhanded let me remind you that bananas were at stake so you know worth it then there was the us intervention in cuba and this nation had been another military dictatorship that responded to the will of the united states but in 1959 stinking fidel castro had to go ruin all of that by overthrowing the government and rising to the seat of power himself now this change of power stunk in the american nostril primarily because castro was a communist it was one thing to have the communist threat all the way across the pacific ocean but now there was a communist threat in our own backyard and so to remedy this problem president eisenhower in the final months of his administration greenlighted a campaign for the united states to train and arm a group of cuban exiles who were hostile to the castro regime in order to overthrow the castro regime now it wasn't until john f kennedy became president a few months later in 1961 that this operation was ready to go it became known as the bay of pigs invasion and it was a massive failure the invaders were quickly killed or captured by castro's troops and this botched overthrow only led to the further alienation of the united states from cuba and the further communist embrace of cuba and the soviet union that will become a massive problem two years later in 1963 in an incident called the cuban missile crisis in which u.s intelligence agencies discovered soviet-style nuclear launch weapons being stockpiled in cuba and that was a big deal because the technology was shaky to launch a nuclear missile from the russian mainland with any hope that it would hit its target all the way across the sea but the technology was just fine for a nuclear warhead to be delivered from cuba and so for several weeks americans were exceedingly tense and woke up every morning wondering if today was the day they were going to get blown up before you go getting all hateful against the soviets for doing such a thing it might be helpful to know that the united states had essentially done the same thing by stockpiling nuclear weapons in turkey which is in close proximity to the soviet union regardless after some intense negotiation the soviet union stood down and the crisis was averted okay those were a couple of examples of u.s intervention in latin america but now let's shift to the middle east and see what's happening over there and for this we need to visit iran now in 1953 the cia conceived and implemented a plot to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister in order to return the shah mohammed reza palavi to the throne you're starting to see a pattern here now why would the u.s want to do that well the iranian prime minister sought to nationalize iran's oil industry and thus take firmer control over it and the u.s and other western nations have become dependent on oil in the last few decades and so this situation was untenable the shah on the other hand was extremely friendly with the united states and accepted munitions and other compensations to keep the oil flowing west okay glad we fixed the middle east no more problems there now of course there's much more to be said there but let's keep right on going over to asia and for this the french colony of indochina otherwise known as vietnam will serve as a magnificent illustration so indochina was finally decolonized after fighting off the french and then the japanese and then the french again and in the end vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel until an election could be held in the north communism took hold into the leadership of ho chi minh while south vietnam remained democratic and if you're thinking this sounds just like the korean conflict then gold star for you my friend eventually this region will be the stage for yet another proxy war between the u.s and the soviet union but that will get its own video anyway for now it'll just be important to know that under the leadership of president eisenhower something like a billion dollars in economic aid was extended to the south vietnamese people in order to stabilize it economically and eisenhower's argument for doing this became known as the domino theory he argued that if south vietnam fell to communism it would be like a domino that fell and knocked over every other domino in the region and soon communism will be widespread over there so keep that first domino up and all shall be well now since we're talking about eisenhower let me just mention one more thing about him and that was his warning against the proliferation of the military-industrial complex now to understand what he meant by this you just need to take the words one at a time military you know what that means industrial our capacity to make things and complex the interweaving of two entities into one so what eisenhower was warning americans about was this growing relationship between the military and our industrial capacity which had been churning out munitions for the cold war arms race and all these military interventions around the world the danger was that with military production so closely tied to our industrial capacity it would be tempting to start making policy decisions namely policy decisions about military interventions based on the material interests of those who produced the weaponry and that my friends would be a bad situation okay thanks for watching here is my a review packet right here which will help you get an a in your class and a five on your exam in may if you were helped by this video and want me to keep making them then go ahead and subscribe and let me know if you did not enjoy this video then just tell the cia that i'm a communist and they will manufacture my overthrow in short order heimler out