The World

Covert help in one form or another was also provided when open assistance was judged counterproductive. In Western Europe (under the NATO umbrella) and in Asia, the United States stationed troops and provided security guarantees to its allies.

the European Coal and Steel Community, consisting of France, West Germany, and Italy, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (often referred to as the Benelux countries). This pact fully integrated the coal and steel industries of these countries so as to make their economies mutually dependent. This marked the beginning of the Europea

For its part, the Soviet Union did what it could to promote anti-American, Communist regimes around the Western Hemisphere and succeeded in Cuba and Nicaragua. It had the advantage of aiding individuals and movements who were fighting against unpopular authoritarian governments that offered little to their people. But again the Soviet help was just

Meiji (which means “the enlightened ruler”) ruled Japan for nearly fifty years, until 1912, a period widely described as the Meiji Restoration in which the modern Japanese state was established. Unlike China, Japan followed a course parallel to what was taking place in Europe and the United States. A modern bureaucratic government and administrativ

There is no specific date when the Cold War ended (as there tends to be when “hot” wars end), but most historians place it in late 1989, when the wall separating East and West Berlin was taken down, or in 1991, when the Soviet Union along with its external empire in Eastern Europe unraveled.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union starting in 1985, played a pivotal role in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev clearly concluded that the Soviet Union could survive and compete on the world stage only if it changed in fundamental ways at home. But his approach to change, in which political reform came before economic restructuring, mostl

What’s more, mature democracies—nations where power is truly checked and balanced—tend to be relatively rare and extraordinarily difficult to bring about, something that makes the democratic peace theory more of a concept than a reality.

Deforestation is a significant cause of global warming, responsible for a good deal of global carbon emissions. Healthy tropical forests absorb carbon dioxide, but when they are cut down to make room for agriculture or to produce timber, not only are they no longer able to absorb carbon as effectively, but their stored carbon is also released into

The United Nations currently recognizes 193 countries in the world.

The World Bank (more formally, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) is not the world’s central bank, as its name suggests, but rather a global organization devoted to promoting economic development in poorer countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the institutions created at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference t