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DNL Vocabulary - The USA and the World

since 1918 [CA v3.1]

Some other glossaries : here & here.

• African-American Civil Rights Movement: encompasses social

movements in the U.S. whose goal was to end racial segregation and
discrimination against black Americans and enforce constitutional voting
rights to them. Nearly 3,500 black Americans (and 1,300 whites) were
lynched in the U. S. between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on "race, color,
religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public
accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected
voting rights.

• Anti-Americanism/Anti-American sentiment: refers to opposition or

hostility to the policies, culture, society, economics, international, or
superpower role of the U.S. Common contemporary negative stereotypes
of Americans include that they are: aggressive, arrogant, ignorant,
overweight, poorly dressed, materialistic, obsessed with making money,
too moralistic and generally obnoxious.

• Arms Race: a competition between countries for superiority in the

number and power of weapons held. During the Cold War the arms race
was between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.

• Bipolarization: marked by two diametrically opposed natures

• Bloc: [from French] a group of people or countries combined by a

common interest or aim (ex. : the Soviet bloc). Synonyms: alliance, axis,
cabal, clique, coalition, entente, faction, group, league...

• Blockade: a military action to surround or barricade a port, island, city or

nation.

• Brinkmanship: bold, aggressive or risky measures that risk war, to

pressure the other side to back down.

• Capitalism: an economic system in which the means of production are

controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market
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economy.

• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): is one of the principal intelligence-

gathering agencies of the U.S. federal government. The CIA has three
traditional principal activities, which are gathering information about
foreign governments, corporations, and individuals; analyzing that
information in order to provide national security intelligence assessment;
and, upon the request of the President of the United States, carrying out
or overseeing covert activities and some tactical operations. Several CIA
activities have attracted criticism. They include nonconsentual human
experiments, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation techniques,
targeted killings, assassinations and the funding and training of militants
who would go on to kill civilians and non-combatants.

• Checkpoint Charlie: a U.S.-manned gateway between West Berlin and

East Berlin when the Berlin Wall divided the city (1961-89).

• Civil war: a war between organized groups within the same state. Since
1945, civil wars have resulted in the deaths of over 25 million people.

• Clash of Civilizations (the): is a theory that people's cultural and

religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold
War world. It was proposed by U.S. political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington in a 1993 article.

• Cold War: the struggle for power between the Soviet Union and the
U.S.A. that lasted from 1947 until the collapse of the Soviet Union
(December 1991). The war was considered "cold" because the aggression
was ideological, economic, and diplomatic rather than a direct military
conflict.

• Containment: fundamental U.S. foreign policy of creating strategic

alliances in order to check the expansion of communism during the Cold
War.

• Comecon: the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (1949-91)

facilitated trade, economic, technical and scientific cooperation between
Soviet bloc nations.

• Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): a confederation of

former Soviet bloc countries, formed in December 1991.

• Communism: is a classless social order structured upon common

ownership of the means of production.

• Commies: Communists.
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• Conscription, draft: compulsory military service, especially in times of

war.

• Coup, putsch, overthrow: is the sudden and illegal seizure of a

government.

• Cowboy diplomacy: is a term used by critics to describe the resolution

of international conflicts through brash risk-taking, intimidation, military
deployment, or a combination of such tactics. It is criticized as stemming
from an overly-simple, dichotomous world view.

• DEFCON: an acronym for U.S. "defense readiness condition", ranging

from DEFCON 5 (peace) to DEFCON 1 (imminent war).

• Democracy: ("rule of the people") is a form of government in which all

eligible citizens participate equally—either directly or indirectly through
elected representatives—in the proposal, development, and creation
of laws.

• Détente: [from French] period of the easing of Cold War tensions

between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1968 to 1979. The era was a
time of increased trade and cooperation with the Soviet Union and the
signing of the SALT treaties. Relations cooled again with the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979).

• Domino Effect: the fear that if one nation falls to communism, its
neighbors will soon follow.

• Drone: an unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV). Aircraft of this type

have no on board human pilot but are under real-time human control. In
recent years the U.S. has increased its use of drone strikes in Pakistan as
part of the War on Terror.

• East Germany, German Democratic Republic (GDR): established in

1949. Communist regime replaced by a multi party democracy in 1989,
reunited with West Germany in 1990.

• Extraordinary/irregular rendition: is the apprehension and extra

judicial transfer of a person from one country to another. During the U.S.
war on terror (since 2001), the term became infamous with U.S. practices
of abducting and transferring terrorism suspects to countries known to
employ torture for the purpose of interrogation.

• Fallout/nuclear/atomic shelter: underground structures, stocked with

food and other supplies, that were intended to keep people safe from
radioactive fallout following a nuclear attack. Many such shelters were
constructed as civil defense measures during the Cold War.
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• Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): a U.S. civilian law enforcement

body, responsible for investigating and prosecuting federal crimes and
protecting domestic security.

• Federal Reserve System (the Fed): is the U.S. central banking

system. Its duties include conducting the monetary policy, regulating
banking institutions, and maintaining the stability of the financial system

• G.I.: is a noun used to describe the soldiers of the U.S. Army, airmen of
the U.S. Army Air Forces, etc.

• Glasnost: a policy of openness promoted during the latter half of the

1980s in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in which government
secrecy was discouraged and distribution of information was encouraged.

• Hard power: is the use of military and economic means to influence the
behavior or interests of other political bodies. This form of political power
is often aggressive, and is most effective when imposed by one political
body upon another of lesser military and/or economic power. According
to Joseph Nye, the term is “the ability to use the carrots and sticks of
economic and military might to make others follow your will.”

• Hegemony: geopolitical and cultural predominance of one country upon

others.

• ICBM: inter-continental ballistic missiles were missiles that could carry

nuclear bombs across thousands of miles.

• Imperialism: an unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in

the form of an empire, based on ideas of superiority and practices of
dominance, and involving the extension of authority and control of one
state or people over another. The term has been applied to Western
political and economic dominance in the 19th and 20th c.

• Iron Curtain: a term used by Winston Churchill in a famous speech

(Fulton, 1946) to describe the ideological conflict and physical boundary
dividing Europe into two separate areas until the end of the Cold War in
1989-91. The term symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself
and its satellite states from open contact with the west and non-Soviet-
controlled areas.

• KGB (Committee for State Security): established in 1954, it sought to

suppress religion, gain foreign intelligence, assist in governing the Soviet
Union, suppress internal resistance, etc., as well as to perform secret
operations and lead propaganda efforts.

• Militarism: is the belief or desire of a government or people that a

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country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to

use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests. It may also
imply the predominance of the armed forces in the administration or
policy of the state.

• Military-industrial complex: a phrase first coined by U.S. President

Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address describing the close
linkage between the U.S. military and private contractors in the military
industry.

• Monroe Doctrine (1823): a US foreign policy that stated that efforts by

European nations to colonize or interfere with states in North or South
America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S.
intervention. It would be invoked by many U.S. statesmen and several
U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald
Reagan and many others. The policy became deeply resented by Latin
American nations for its overt interventionism and perceived U.S.
imperialism. President Barack Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry told
the Organization of American States in November 2013 that the Monroe
Doctrine was dead.

• Mutually assured destruction (MAD): is a doctrine of military strategy

and national security policy in which a full-scale use of weapons of mass
destruction by two opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation
of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of
deterrence where the threat of using strong weapons against the
enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

• Pentagon (the): built in 1941-43, is the headquarters of the U.S.

Department of Defense, located in Arlington County (Virginia). It's often
used metonymically to refer to the U.S. military. It's a large office
building, with about 6,500,000 sq ft (600,000 m2) and more than 31,000
workers. On September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was
hijacked and flown into the Western side of the building, killing 189
people.

• Perestroika: introduced in 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev, a policy to

restructure the Soviet political and economic system.

• Policy by press release: refers to the act of attempting to influence

public policy through press releases intended to alarm the public into
demanding action from their elected officials. In modern times, the term
is used to dismiss an opponent's claims, suggesting the arguments are
lacking in substance, and are created solely to generate media attention.
Costly examples of this behavior were the mythical "bomber gap" (1954-
56) and "missile gap" (1957-61 & 1974-76) between the Soviet Union and
the U.S.A.
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• Politburo: ("Political Bureau") executive committee of the Communist

Party and the body that select the general secretary of the Communist
Party.

• Power politics: is a form of international relations in which nations

protect their own interests by threatening one another with military,
economic or political aggression. Techniques of power politics include:
blackmail, the massing of military units on a border, the imposition of
tariffs or economic sanctions, covert operations...

• Proxy war: when two sides use third parties to fight rather than fighting
each other directly. The U.S. and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars
during the Cold War (1947-91) such as the Korean War (1950-53) and the
Vietnam War (1964-1975).

• Rambo: is a famous Hollywood film series (1982-2008) starring Sylvester

Stallone as John Rambo, a troubled Vietnam War veteran who is skilled in
many aspects of survival, hand to hand combat and guerrilla warfare.

• Red Scare: is the promotion of fear of a potential rise of communism or

radical leftism. In the U.S., the First Red Scare (1919-20) was about
communist revolution (Bolshevism) and anarchism. The Second Red
Scare (1947-54) was focused on national and foreign communists
infiltrating the federal government and influencing society.

• Satellite state: designates a country that is formally independent, but

under heavy political, economic and military influence or control of
another country. It's used mainly to refer to Central and Eastern European
countries under the hegemony of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

• Soft power: is a concept developed by Joseph Nye of Harvard University

to describe the ability to attract and co-opt (rather than coerce, use force
or give money) as a means of persuasion. The term is now widely used in
international affairs by analysts and statesmen. Soft power can be
wielded not just by states but also by all actors in international politics,
such as NGOs or international institutions. A country's soft power,
according to Nye, rests on three resources: "its culture (in places where it
is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at
home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when others see them as
legitimate and having moral authority."

• Space Race: was a competition (1957–75) between the Soviet Union

and the United States, for supremacy in spaceflight capability. The
technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as
necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority.
The Soviets won the first "lap" with the October 4, 1957 launch of the
world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik I. The Race reached its zenith with
the July 20, 1969 landing of the first humans on the Moon (Apollo 11) and
concluded in a period of détente with the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz meeting
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in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew.

• Special Relationship: is a phrase used to describe the exceptionally

close political, diplomatic, cultural, economic, military and historical
relations between the United Kingdom and the U.S., following its use in a
1946 speech by British statesman Winston Churchill.

• Stars and Stripes ("Old Glory", "The Star-Spangled Banner"): The

national flag of the U. S. A. consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of
red (top and bottom) alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the
corner (referred to specifically as the "union") bearing fifty small, white,
five-pointed stars. The 50 stars on the flag represent the 50 states of the
United States of America and the 13 stripes represent the thirteen British
colonies that declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in
1776.

• Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World; fr. La Liberté

éclairant le monde): is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island
in the middle of New York Harbor, in Manhattan. The statue dedicated on
October 1886, was a gift to the U.S. from the people of France. The
statue is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman
goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet
evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. A broken chain lies at her feet.
The statue is an icon of freedom and of the United States: a welcoming
signal to immigrants arriving from abroad.

• Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT): negotiations between the

U.S. and the Soviet Union aimed at curtailing the manufacture of
strategic nuclear missiles. The first round of negotiations began in 1969
and resulted in a treaty regulating anti ballistic missiles (ABM) and
freezing the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-
launched ballistic missiles. It was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and
president Richard Nixon in 1972. A second round of talks (1972–79),
known as SALT II, addressed the asymmetry between the two sides'
strategic forces and ended with an agreement to limit strategic launchers
(see MIRV). Signed by Brezhnev and president Jimmy Carter, it was never
formally ratified by the U.S. Senate, though its terms were observed by
both sides. Subsequent negotiations took the name Strategic Arms
Reduction Talks (START).

• Superpower: a country that dominates in political and military power.

During the Cold War (1947-91), there were two superpowers: the Soviet
Union and the United States of America.

• Totalitarianism: describes a political system in which the state holds

total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public
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and private life.

• Uncle Sam: (initials U.S.) is a common national personification of the

American government that, according to legend, came into use during
the War of 1812 and was supposedly named for Samuel Wilson. Uncle
Sam didn't get a standard appearance until the well-known "recruitment"
poster of Uncle Sam was created in 1917 by James Montgomery Flagg
(inspired by a famous British poster). It was this image more than any
other that set the appearance of Uncle Sam as the elderly man with
white hair and a goatee (a style of facial hair) wearing a white top hat
with white stars on a blue band, a blue tail coat and red and white striped
trousers.

• U.S. Congress: is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of

the U.S.A. consisting of two houses: the Senate and the House of
Representatives. The Congress meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washington,
D.C. Congress has an important role in national defense, including the
exclusive power to declare war, to raise and maintain the armed forces,
and to make rules for the military.

• U.S. foreign aid: is aid given by the U.S.A. to other countries. It can be
divided into two broad categories: military and economic assistance. The
U.S. government channels about half of its economic assistance through
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

• U.S. Marine Corps (USMC): is a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces

responsible for providing power projection from the sea. By the mid-20th
century, the USMC had become a dominant practitioner of amphibious
warfare. Its ability to rapidly respond on short notice to expeditionary
crises gives it a strong role in the execution of American foreign policy.

• U.S. National Security Council (NSC): the White House NSC, created
in 1947, is the principal forum used by the U.S. President for considering
national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national
security advisors and Cabinet officials.

• U.S. Secretary of Defense: is the leader of the Department of

Defense (the Pentagon). This position corresponds to what is generally
known as a Defense Minister in many other countries. He's appointed by
the President with the advice and consent of the Senate.

• U.S. Secretary of State: [fr. secrétaire d'État] is a senior official of the

federal government heading the Department of State, and is
considered to be the U.S. government's equivalent of a Minister for
Foreign Affairs. He's appointed by the President with the advice and
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consent of the Senate.

• U.S.S.R.: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), also

commonly called the Soviet Union, was from 1922 to 1991 a communist
country that consisted of what is now Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania,
Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

• U-2: the Lockheed U-2 is a ultra-high altitude intelligence gathering

aircraft. In 1960, CIA pilot Gary Powers was shot down while flying a U-2
over Soviet territory. In 1962, a U-2 was shot down over communist Cuba
by surface-to-air missiles during the Cuban missile crisis.

• War on Terror: also known as the "Global War on Terrorism" or

"Overseas Contingency Operation", is a term which has been applied to
an international military campaign, that started after the 11 September
2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., to eliminate al-Qaeda and other
militant islamist organizations.

• Warsaw Pact (formally, the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and

Mutual Assistance): was a collective defense treaty among eight
communist States of Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the
Cold War. The founding treaty was established under the initiative of the
Soviet Union and signed on May 1955, in Warsaw (Poland). The Warsaw
Pact was in part a Soviet military reaction to the integration of West
Germany into NATO in 1955.

• Western Bloc: during the Cold War refers to the countries allied with the
United States and NATO against the Soviet Union and its allies. The
governments and press of the Western Bloc were more inclined to refer to
themselves as the "Free World" or "Western World."

• West Germany, Federal Republic of Germany (FRG): established in

1949 from the zones of Germany occupied by the British, Americans, and
French after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Reunited with East Germany in
1990.

• Wilsonianism: describe a certain type of ideological perspectives on

foreign policy. The term comes from the ideology of U.S. President
Thomas Woodrow Wilson and his famous Fourteen Points [text].
Common principles include: advocacy of the spread of democracy;
advocacy of the spread of capitalism; opposition to isolationism and non-
interventionism; pro-imperialism. Ex.: Barack Obama's intervention in the
2011 Libyan civil war.