Description
Think of yourself as a blogger. For each discussion board response, you need to write a substantial response. Your response should include two paragraphs. The first paragraph should indicate what you learned from the posted content, highlighting several ideas that you found interesting. Ask yourself in writing the first paragraph of each response: What did I learn about the topic from the content – videos or articles? The more you demonstrate what your learned that you otherwise did not know about the topic, the better off you are. What ideas and/or information in the content did you learn and find interesting? In the second paragraph you should offer an educated opinion on the topic. Begin this paragraph with something like, “In my opinion, I think that…? And not just what you think, but give a college-level explanation of WHY you think a certain way about the topic.
For thousands of years, human civilizations, and the states (governments) they have established, especially since the Peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648 following the Thirty Years War 1616-48), state leaders and scholars alike have grappled with the issue of War and Peace. The problem of understanding the causes of war and of identifying the ways to avoid war and achieve peace among nations, have been (and continue to be) the most elusive goals of the international community of states.
The quest to identify the causes of conflict and war, and therefore to devise international institutions (organizations) and international laws to avoid war achieve peace (i.e., the peaceful, diplomatic resolutions of conflicts among nations), has been (and continues to be) the most pressing and elusive question for scholars and practitioners of international relations.
There is a basic pattern in world politics: major shocks to the international system (major, systemic wars that span regions) are followed by international conferences ( governments coming together to restore peace, order and stability in world politics), which lead to new ideas and institutions. After the Thirty Years War (1618-48), the Napoleonic Wars (1801-15), World War I (1914-18), World War II (1939-45), the Cold War (1945-1991), etc., new ideas and international institutions emerged.
After World War I, world leaders created a new idea and a new institution to help avoid war and produce peace going forward: the idea of collective security (“a threat to one is a threat to all”) and the first world organization, the League of Nations based in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the predecessor of the United Nations based in New York City.
Watch the following videos and (1) identify a minimum of five things you learned about NATO and post a response to the question of whether NATO remains a relevant regional security organization in the post-Cold War world.
