Great World Powers: Negative Than Positive Effects Of The Cold War

Throughout history, there have been many ups and downs that impacted the way countries interact with each other. The interaction between significant countries has caused major problems including wars, imperialism, and genocides. The overall impact of great world powers from the beginning of the 1900’s to present day has been more negative than positive because of events and occurrences such as of imperialism in Africa, the lasting impacts of World War I and the effects of the Cold War.

Perhaps one of the main reasons that the great world powers had a more negative than positive impact on the world is because of the effects of World War 1. As a result of World War I there was the appeasement under Britain and France granted to German powers.

During the Cold war, great world powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars in several countries, one specifically being Vietnam. The importance of the Cold war in Vietnam was the fact that the world powers took control of the two parts of the country. In order to contain communism the United States took sides with South Vietnam and on the opposing side was North Vietnam with the help of the Soviet Union, of whom in contrast were trying to spread communism. The two world powers came into play because they did not want to fight their own war so they fought the proxy wars instead. Over time, communism in the North began to gain more power, leading the United States to take action. They used a herbicide called agent orange which is a defoliant chemical used to eliminate the forest that was helping North Vietnam. This chemical was negative because it lessened crops for North Korea but in the long run caused birth defects and cancer in Vietnam, that are still a problem 50 years later. If the great world powers hadn’t gotten involved in the proxy wars in the first place, this wouldn't have been a big problem causing the death of

The world powers helped increase infrastructure and technology such as building railroads and telegraphs as well as improving education throughout the continent as a whole. Although this was true and greatly helped Africa modernize and become slightly more developed, the great world powers still had a more negative effect because they came into Africa and held the Berlin Conference. This conference was held in order to settle disputes between European countries and the world powers, about the division of Africa. The countries were extracting resources from all over Africa. The Berlin Conference mainly impacted the citizens of Africa because they were consistently put in countries that they were not familiar with, as well a the European countries that ruled them didn’t practice their culture, making it hard on all the different ethnic groups within