Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
wounded; only 1,000 of the 21,000 Japanese defenders survived. One more bloody assault on Okinawa,
a large island south of Japan, lay ahead. With its fall in June 1945, Japan was cut off and reeling under
the constant pounding of American bombers, which now attacked with near impunity. The firebombing of
Tokyo in March 1945, for instance, killed 100,000 and left Tokyo in flames. A few months later, in August
1945, the war came to a close with the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the justification for which is still debated today.
Dien Bien Phu
With the end of the war against Japan, Europe and America moved quickly to assert
their control over Japan's Asian holdings. The French tried to reestablish control over old colonies in
Southeast Asia—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. But the Vietnamese, under Communist leader Ho Chi
Minh and his brilliant general Vo Nguyen Giap, balked and expected independence. War came in 1946,
with the United States openly aiding the French effort to maintain control of the country. A largely guerrilla
war was fought for the next seven years, with the French controlling the cities but the Viet Minh guerrillas
holding the countryside. Struggling against a largely invisible enemy, the French command hoped to lure
the Viet Minh into a pitched battle and chose the hamlet of Dien Bien Phu, a small village 200 miles (320
km) west of Hanoi, as the site of the trap.
But the tables were turned. The Viet Minh began a long, deadly siege of the French fortifications at
Dien Bien Phu. As the Western world watched, the French garrison was depleted in the six-month siege,
and the United States contemplated military assistance. The possibility of using an atomic weapon against
the Viet Minh was even proposed by President Eisenhower. In May 1954, the French succumbed and sur-
rendered. A peace treaty followed, dividing Vietnam into two separate states, the Communist north and the
anti-Communist republic in the south.
Having learned nothing from the disastrous French experience and fearing a “domino effect” on the
rest of the region if South Vietnam also fell to the Communists, the United States almost immediately re-
placed the French in providing aid and then troops to South Vietnam in the ultimately disastrous American
involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Country, Nation, Republic, State: A Geopolitical Primer
Ever since George H. W. Bush proclaimed a “new world order,” there has been more chaos around the
globe than the tidy scenes of blissful cooperation the American president wistfully envisioned. In spite of
Bush's proclamation, little about the affairs of the world has been new, and much less has been orderly. In
the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, there have been bloody civil wars in several former Soviet
republics. And Yugoslavia—arbitrarily carved out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after
World War I—has been shattered by a brutal outburst of ethnic and nationalistic fighting that has left the
country broken into pieces. Apparently, there is no oil in Sarajevo, however. So the “coalition” that “liber-
ated” Kuwait wasn't equally inspired to heroic deeds by the sight of merciless bloodshed in the Balkans.
Apart from the tragedy of Yugoslavia, the extraordinary events in Europe during recent times have
clearly transformed the world that was left after World War II. For nearly half a century of cold war,
two contending camps led by the United States and the Soviet Union struggled for supremacy. Every
local brushfire war around the globe was fanned into a superpower crisis. And Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, the
Middle East, and Nicaragua were regional conflicts that threatened to burst into much larger conflagra-
tions, always with the specter of a mushroom cloud lingering in the background. Ironically, the civil wars
in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet republics have largely been ignored by the United States and Russia.
A decade or two ago, these conflicts would have had tanks rolling across borders, tens of thousands of
troops on alert, and twitchy fingers in Moscow and Washington edging closer to war buttons.
