Essay On The Korean War

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At the end of the catastrophic World War II on October 24, 1945, fifty-one nations gathered to officially form the United Nations, an organization that promoted peace and security for all of its members. Despite the success of establishing a worldwide peace-keeping force, tensions were high between the powers of the Western Bloc (the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact). Ironically, a mere five years after the formation of the UN, the first major outbreak in the Cold War occurred: the Korean War. The effects of the Korean War would not only forever change the state of North and South Korea, but also have a significant effect on all the other nations involved in the Korean War. A few years before the conflict in Korea, US President Truman set forth an international policy known as the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine stated that the United States would aid countries that were fighting communist takeover. Combined with the ideological differences between the US and the USSR, the Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb pushed tensions past the breaking point, moving both countries into an arms race during which each attempted to amass more weapons than the other nation. Around the same time, over in Asia, the Communist Party banished Chinese Nationalists, the local democratic party, and began taking hold under Mao Zedong. This sparked fear within the Americans, for China was a large, influential country in Asia; Americans began to believe that China’s communistic society would influence its smaller surrounding countries to adopt communism as well. That series of events, along with the perceived threat of communism spreading, led to a tim... ... middle of paper ... ...nt that democracy and communism could not cooperate with one another as shown in the United Nations Security Council after the Soviet Union boycott. UN initiatives often faced a stalemate, as the Soviet Union would many times prove difficult to the other members of the Security Council because its representative would constantly veto acts that favored democracy at the expense of communism, while other powers such as the United States would veto and shut down any proposals that benefited communism. The Korean War proved that democracy and communism could and would not get along, adding fuel to the imminent Cold War. What started as a civil war in a small Asian country quickly erupted into an international division between opposing powers backed by incompatible political systems. The Korean War has left its mark on surviving Koreans as well as others around the world.

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