Term Paper on "Lord Balfour Made a Unilateral Decision"

Term Paper 3 pages (1319 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Lord Balfour made a unilateral decision a century ago. What was that decision and how has it affected the world both then and now?

Approximately a decade before the outbreak of World War I, Britain was struggling to maintain her unchallenged military superiority in Europe. Germany had already secured much of the world's natural supplies of calcium acetate, the most important natural precursor acetone, necessary to produce acetone, a crucial component of high quality military explosives at the time.

This lead to a prolonged negotiation between the British government and Chaim Weizmann, prominent Zionist who sought to reclaim the ancient lands of Israel for the Jewish people. Weizmann, a chemist, had developed a process for producing acetone artificially and his terms of agreement included the adoption of Lord Balfour's 1917 Declaration calling for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then under British control. The Balfour Declaration under the British Mandate in the Middle East was supported by the League of nations after the war and promoted Jewish immigration into Palestine during the period between the world wars. Eventually, the United Nations voted to establish the Jewish State of Israel and a separate Palestinian State in 1947. The Palestinians never accepted the authority of the United Nations and reacted by attacking the newly formed state almost immediately. Sixty years later, the region is still plagued by turmoil and violent opposition that are directly traceable back to the Balfour Declaration.

2."The enemy of my enemy is my friend." This could be applied to U.S. foreign policy. Give examples and discuss its pros and cons. One of the best examples in modern Western history is the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States that achieved a hard-fought victory against the Nazis and the Axis powers during World War II. The advantage of cooperation with Russia was essential to U.S. victory in Europe. Had Russia remained neutral during the Nazi occupation of Western Europe, Hitler could have concentrated all his forces against the Allies. German reinforcements in significant numbers immediately after the June 4, 1944 Normandy Invasion would likely have repelled the Allied Expeditionary Force from landing in occupied France.

Hitler understood the immense difficulty of a simultaneous conflict with Russia in the East and American forces in the West long before he initiated war in Europe and sought to avoid it by signing a secret non-aggression pact with Stalin. Had Hitler not violated it and triggered war with Russia in 1941, it is likely that the U.S. And Allied Forces would have had to absorb many of the 20 million casualties, suffering them in place of Soviet armies.

Even before Germany surrendered in the Spring of 1945, the Soviets and American Forces were working against each other to secure strategic territories and some of the spoils of war. Without the mutual fear of Nazi Germany to overshadow their conflicting interests, the two former allies spent most of the next half century in a "cold war" that drained tremendous resources from both countries. Throughout the Cold War, the United States provided financial and military support for mutual enemies of Communist expansion who were hardly "friends" in any other respect. The two best examples are American support for Afghanistan Mujahedin fighting Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s and American support and arming of Saddam Hussein's forces to prevent an Iranian victory over Iraq. The consequences of supporting a non-ally during a temporary struggle against a mutual enemy were demonstrated in both cases after Hussein turned American-supplied weapons against Iraqi Kurds and by the fact that many of the Afghani Mujahedin we assisted 20 years ago are now part of the Taliban leadership engaged in the war against the U.S.

3. Explain the bi-polar and unipolar nature or the 20th-21th century. What were the pluses and the minuses of both?

The 20th century saw several cycles of changes between unipolar global powers and bi-polar power sharing as the nation states of the… READ MORE

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