Do you agree or disagree with the statement '' World War 1 II and Cold War are in fact one single Seventy-seven year conflict '' Present 3 arguments?

Answer 1

In many ways they do represent the same overarching conflict, that being who would control the world as the dominant superpower. They are, however, simply the continuation of the previous conflict, going back much further than the first World War (which itself began as a direct result of the Balkan wars, the Crimean War, and the Franco-Prussian wars, among others).

The first World War was the last horrah of old-school imperialism, in which empires were built out of adjacency. The larger, more dominant nation conquered those closest to it. During this time period, a new imperialism had risen, in which the United Kingdom, France, and the United States had expanded their respective empires across vast seas, enforcing them with massive navies and armies. Russia, due to its sympathy towards the Slavic peoples of the Balkans and its desire for land in former Poland, found itself at arms with Austria, which brought in their ally Germany. France declared war on Germany to protect Russia, and Britain joined the war when Germany entered Belgium, which Britain guaranteed freedom for. The Ottoman Empire joined seeking to throw Russia and Britain out of its former territories, Japan joined in order to snatch up German territory in the Pacific and China, and the United States joined to ensure its security at sea (and against a potential attack by Mexico, which Germany attempted to coax into a war for its former territories in the American southwest).

The treaty which ended the first world war disassembled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, creating many nation-states and multinational states, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The German Empire was brought down and replaced with the democratic Weimar Republic, and Poland recreated out of its eastern territories minus East Prussia. The Ottoman Empire collapsed as Britain and France took control of the Middle East, and Turkey rose up in rebellion against this rule, creating the first modern democracy in the Middle East. Japan, Britain, and France all greatly benefited in terms of territory, while the Russian Empire collapsed completely. The resulting civil war saw the rise of the communist state in the form of the U.S.S.R.

As a result of the treaty and old hatreds which ran deep throughout all of Europe, fascism began to rise, primarily through the cities of the former empires (note that in the first world war, the City mostly avoided the war, while the battlefields were reserved to, literally, the fields). Adolf Hitler, inspired and radicalized in Vienna, Austria, formed the core of his political support in southern Weimar Germany, eventually rising to power and beginning the reacquisition of territories lost by both 'German' empires in the previous war. Through the invasion of Austria, the Czech-half of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France, and the establishment of a system of allied fascist states in Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Vichy France, Francisco Franco's Spain and Benito Mussolini's Italy, Hitler 'united' mainland Europe against supposedly foreign threats of Jews and Slavs, and created a Third Reich, or the third incarnation of the German people's Empire, formerly recognized in the Holy Roman Empire (itself an incarnation of the original Roman Empire) and German/Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Meanwhile in the East, Japan had risen from obscurity to defeat and conquer China, Korea and Russia in major conflicts, and now eyed ruling the entirety of the Pacific, as the Japanese mainland had little in the ways of Natural Resources, and the Japanese people had become convinced by their leadership that they were a superior, god-chosen people (God being the Emperor himself). Allied with Hitler, who saw the Japanese as a tool to engage both the Russian in their east and the British in India and Austrlia, and Thailand, the Japanese struck out in December, 1941 in an attempt to blitzkreig throughout the last free portions of the Pacific, capturing in days the Indonesian possessions of the Netherlands, the Malaysian, Chinese, Singaporean and Burmese possessions of Britain, and the Filipino possessions of the United States. The U.S., being more than wary of such an attack, promptly declared war on Japan and set about the slow process of knocking them out of the Pacific, island by island. Hitler, rather foolishly, declared war on the U.S., permitting Britain's oldest ally (oddly enough) to join in the war in Europe.

Prior to this, however, was the engagement between fascist and communist forces. Russia and Germany had signed a nonaggression treaty during the initial invasion of Poland, with both sides taking their half of the country. Hitler, however, eyed the vast oil reserves of Russia, as well as her enormous farmlands in the Ukraine, and decided to go for it before the communists could prepare for their own war against the western world. Stalin, deeply unprepared following a purge of his best military officers for political reasons, lost 2/3rds of his population in the initial months, but halted Hitler at the Volga and at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg). Russian soldiers pushed back against the Nazis, eventually crushing their eastern allies in quick succession and destroying their best technologies and troops with shear numbers and raw strength.

World War II ended when the nuclear age was ushered in, the United States opting to use the world's newest and most destructive weapon against Japan to bring a more swift end to the bloodiest conflict in human history, hoping this demonstration of power could prevent a future conflict between countries and establish them, the historic guy in the corner watching the fight, as the world's preemptive superpower. Unfortunately, Russia stole its fair share of German scientists too, and thus the Cold War began. France, Great Britain, and China would eventually develop their own weapons, and the various countries began a 50-year long system of proxy wars.

First, Israel, supported by Russia, rose out of the Middle East against the newly independent Arab states, which themselves found support in Britain and France. Then, China's civil war, which had been put on the backburner for half-a-century during the Sino-Japanese conflict, concluded with Soviet-back communists taking control. Korean communists rose, and the western powers intervened. The threat of Chinese nuclear intervention created a line-in-the-sand, ushering in the North-South era, and Chinese-backed rebels in Vietnam, who had fought French occupation for decades, finally won their chunk of territory, bringing in the United States hoping to prevent the spread of communism. Laos and Cambodia quickly fell as well. Israel soon found itself, once more, defending against a score of hostiles, launched a preemptive strike against communist-back Egypt and Syria, who were undermining the west in their own attempt to gain more economic autonomy. Shia radicals, who saw the rise of a Jewish state in the center of Islamic society as a westerner's affront to God, launched a revolution in Iran, establishing an Islamic Republic. Russia's attempted invasion of Afghanistan dissolved when Sunni radicals launched a guerrilla campaign. The U.S.S.R. and its satellite states, realizing all too clearly that their western foes and capitalism in general had outpaced their communist dictatorships, collapse, bringing down the Iron Curtain, reuniting Germany's east and west, and bringing the threat of nuclear war down a dozen pegs.

Meanwhile, Islamic radicalism continues to poke at the United States, who survived the trials of the Cold War and came out as the world's largest economy, most powerful military, and most innovative industry. In World War I, it acted as a defender of a new imperialism against the old continental ways, in World War II, it acted out of self-defense against a blitzkreig of fascism, and in the Cold War, acted where it felt necessary to combat a creeping communism. Each war saw the fall of an old ideology of just how a country should work, what a vote meant, and just who earned that dollar. Each war a result of power becoming imbalanced due to the outcome of the last. Each in effect a continuation of the previous, but each conflict taking on a flavor of its own. Each time, a notably smaller power wanting to rise against the status quo and take over, and each time, the same power, the United States, coming out on top despite little intentional design to do so prior to the conflict's beginnings.