4 - The United States and the Free World

Summary

The idea of the Free World emerged in World War II from the struggle of Western liberal democracies against their autocratic and totalitarian enemies. After the war, the Free World consisted of the United States, a group of Western European liberal democracies that re-emerged after liberation from Germany and sought American protection, and the reconstructed and mostly demilitarized war enemies Italy, (West) Germany, and Japan. The US-led anti-communist alliance building in the wake of the Korean War increasingly included Asian and the Middle Eastern countries in the defense of the Free World, although they often were authoritarian . The liberal-democratic nature of the Free World’s core in Europe allowed open political disagreements to emerge, mostly between Charles de Gaulle’s France and the Anglo-American powers but also within the societies of the Free World itself. These conflicts reached their combined peak in 1968 over the Vietnam War and widespread popular protests in several Western countries. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and subsequent changes of government in the West, however, helped to recreate a semblance of unity within the Free World by the early 1970s.