Israel also evacuated Sinai. In the meantime, Nasser had ordered the destruction of several oil pipelines, meaning that Western European countries faced their first cuts in fuel supplies. The upshot of all this was that Nasser, boosted by his political and diplomatic victory, enjoyed immense prestige in the Arab world.
He exploited to the full his image as the victim of an imperialist plot. The European powers were forced to recognise once and for all that they were not world powers and that their role on the international stage could not be more than that of supporting the United States. Indeed, it became difficult for them to pursue an independent policy on the world stage. Their influence in the Middle East became almost non-existent. The Suez Crisis therefore ended in a moral defeat and a diplomatic fiasco for the former colonial powers, while Colonel Nasser consolidated his position as defender of the Arab cause and champion of decolonisation.
Those that escaped envelopment and capture were rapidly forced back north all the way to the border with China at the Yalu River or into the mountainous interior. At this point, in October , Chinese forces crossed the Yalu and entered the war. Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces that continued until mid After these reversals of fortune, which saw Seoul change hands four times, the last two years of conflict became a war of attrition, with the front line close to the 38th parallel.
The war in the air, however, was never a stalemate. North Korea was subject to a massive bombing campaign. Jet fighters confronted each other in air-to-air combat for the first time in history, and Soviet pilots covertly flew in defense of their communist allies. The fighting ended on July 27, , when an armistice was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone to separate North and South Korea and allowed the return of prisoners.
In North Korea, Kim Il-sung created a highly centralized and brutal dictatorship, according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality. However, no peace treaty has been signed, and the two Koreas are technically still at war. Periodic clashes, many of which are deadly, have continued to the present. The Korean War is seen as one of the most significant impacts of the containment policy of the U.
In August , the Soviet Union declared war on Japan as a result of an agreement with the United States and liberated Korea north of the 38th parallel. By , as a product of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, Korea was split into two regions with separate governments.
Both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of Korea and neither side accepted the border as permanent. The civil war escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces—supported by the Soviet Union and China—moved to the south to unite the country on June 25, In early , the United States made its first commitment to form a peace treaty with Japan that would guarantee long-term U.
Some observers including George Kennan believed that the Japanese treaty led Stalin to approve a plan to invade U. Public opinion in countries involved, such as Great Britain, was divided for and against the war. Many feared an escalation into a general war with Communist China and even nuclear war. The strong opposition to the war often strained Anglo-American relations. For these reasons, British officials sought a speedy end to the conflict, hoping to unite Korea under United Nations auspices and withdrawal of all foreign forces.
The war was a political disaster for the Soviet Union. Its central objective, the unification of the Korean peninsula under the Kim Il-Sung regime, was not achieved. Boundaries of both parts of Korea remained practically unchanged. Relations with communist ally China were seriously and permanently spoiled, leading to the Sino-Soviet split that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in The war, meanwhile, united the countries within the capitalist bloc: the Korean War accelerated the conclusion of a peace agreement between the U.
However, because of the war, the authority of the Soviets grew, evident in their readiness to interfere in developing countries of the Third World, many of which went down the socialist path of development after the Korean War after selecting the Soviet Union as their patron. The U. However, the success of the Inchon landing inspired the U. The Chinese sent in a large army and defeated the U.
This interpretation allowed the episode to confirm the wisdom of containment doctrine as opposed to rollback. The Communists were later pushed back to around the original border. His focus shifted to negotiating a settlement,finally reached in Korean War: Clockwise from top: U.
Marines retreating during the Battle of the Chosin Resevoir, U. The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Germany from to , aimed at preventing East Germans from fleeing to stop economically disastrous migration of workers.
The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Germany from to Its demolition officially began on June 13, and was completed in From there, they could travel to West Germany and other Western European countries.
Between and , the Wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5, people attempted to escape over the Wall, with an estimated death toll ranging from to more than in and around Berlin. The Wall was built in to prevent East Germans from fleeing and stop an economically disastrous migration of workers.
It was a symbol of the Cold War, and its fall in marked the approaching end of the war. With the closing of the East-West sector boundary in Berlin, the vast majority of East Germans could no longer travel or emigrate to West Germany. Berlin soon went from the easiest place to make an unauthorized crossing between East and West Germany to the most difficult. Many families were split, and East Berliners employed in the West were cut off from their jobs.
West Berlin became an isolated exclave in a hostile land. West Berliners demonstrated against the Wall, led by their Mayor Willy Brandt, who strongly criticized the United States for failing to respond.
Allied intelligence agencies had hypothesized about a wall to stop the flood of refugees, but the main candidate for its location was around the perimeter of the city.
I see no reason why the Soviet Union should think it is… to their advantage in any way to leave there that monument to communist failure. United States and UK sources expected the Soviet sector to be sealed off from West Berlin, but were surprised how long they took to do so. Thus, they concluded that the possibility of a Soviet military conflict over Berlin had decreased.
Another official justification was the activities of Western agents in Eastern Europe. East Germans and others greeted such statements with skepticism, as most of the time the border was closed for citizens of East Germany traveling to the West but not for residents of West Berlin travelling East.
The construction of the Wall caused considerable hardship to families divided by it. Most people believed that the Wall was mainly a means of preventing the citizens of East Germany from entering or fleeing to West Berlin. During the years of the Wall, around 5, people successfully defected to West Berlin. GDR officials denied issuing the latter. Early successful escapes involved people jumping the initial barbed wire or leaping out of apartment windows along the line, but these ended as the Wall was fortified.
East German authorities no longer permitted apartments near the Wall to be occupied, and any building near the Wall had its windows boarded and later bricked up. On 22 August , Ida Siekmann was the first casualty at the Berlin Wall: she died after she jumped out of her third floor apartment at 48 Bernauer Strasse. He attempted to swim across the Spree Canal to West Germany on August 24, , the same day that East German police received shoot-to-kill orders to prevent anyone from escaping. East Germans successfully defected by a variety of methods: digging long tunnels under the Wall, waiting for favorable winds and taking a hot air balloon, sliding along aerial wires, flying ultralights and, in one instance, simply driving a sports car at full speed through the basic initial fortifications.
When a metal beam was placed at checkpoints to prevent this kind of defection, up to four people two in the front seats and possibly two in the boot drove under the bar in a sports car that had been modified to allow the roof and windscreen to come away when it made contact with the beam.
They lay flat and kept driving forward. King Farouk , the ruler of Egypt, was forced into exile in mid A year later, a group of army officers formally took over the government which they already controlled. The titular head of the junta was General Mohammed Neguib. The real power behind the new throne was an ambitious and visionary young colonel who dreamed of reasserting the dignity and freedom of the Arab nation, with Egypt at the heart of the renaissance.
His name was Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser's first target was the continued British military presence in the Suez canal zone. A source of bitter resentment among many Egyptians, that presence was a symbol of British imperial dominance since the s. In , having established himself as uncontested leader of Egypt, Nasser negotiated a new treaty, under which British forces would leave within 20 months. At first, the largely peaceful transition of power in Egypt was little noticed in a world beset by turmoil and revolution.
The cold war was at its height. Communism was entrenched throughout eastern Europe; the French were being chased out of Indo-China and were engaged in a vicious civil war in Algeria; the infant state of Israel had fought off the combined might of six Arab armies, and Britain was trying to hold down insurgents in Cyprus, Kenya and Malaya. British politics, too, was in a state of flux, with a new generation of leaders emerging to preside over belated postwar prosperity.
But when Winston Churchill resigned as prime minister in , at the age of 80, he was succeeded by the last of the old guard: Anthony Eden.
After a lifetime at the cutting edge of British statesmanship, Eden was a curiously inadequate man. He had the vanity that often accompanies good looks, and the querulous temper that goes with innate weakness. He had been foreign secretary throughout the war and again, under the old imperialist Churchill, from to For all his experience, he never absorbed the simple postwar truth: that the world had changed forever.
In July , the last British soldiers pulled out of the canal zone. Eden was scandalised and, riding a wave of popular indignation, prepared a grotesquely disproportionate response: full scale invasion. Nasser's nationalisation of the canal was followed by intensive diplomatic activity, ostensibly aimed at establishing some kind of international control of the strategically vital waterway.
It turned out to be a smokescreen for military preparations. In September, Nasser made a defiant speech rejecting the idea of international supervision of an Egyptian national asset. By then, the die was cast. British and French troops, spearheaded by airborne forces , invaded the canal zone on October Their governments told an outraged world that they had to invade, to separate Egyptian and Israeli forces, and thus protect the freedom of navigation on the canal.
The reality was that the British and French, in top secret negotiations with Israel had forged an agreement for joint military operations. Israel, in fact, had the most legitimate grievance of the three invaders, for since the establishment of the Jewish state in , Egypt had denied passage through the canal to any Israeli-flagged or Israel-bound ships. Israeli forces swept into the Sinai desert on September 29, two days before the Anglo-French invasion, and raced towards the canal.
One column was headed by a young brigade commander who would go on to become prime minister: Ariel Sharon. In less than seven days, the entire Sinai peninsula was in Israeli hands. The Anglo-French invasion was a good deal more ignominious. Just eight days after the first airborne lands, the operation was halted under a ceasefire ostensibly ordered by the United Nations, but in fact dictated by the Americans.
The Egyptian air force had been destroyed and its army mauled - though it put up spirited resistance both in the canal zone and in Sinai. There is little doubt that the invading allies, who had overwhelming military advantage, could have gone on to take undisputed control of the canal zone - albeit at a cruel cost.
The greatest irony of the operation was that it was totally counterproductive.
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