I come to you this evening to discuss the extremely important and rapidly changing circumstances in Southwest Asia. . . .
. . . Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan, which had hitherto not been an occupied satellite of the Soviet Union.
Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.
The Soviets claim, falsely, that they were invited into Afghanistan to help protect that country from some unnamed outside threat. But the President, who had been the leader of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, was assassinated – along with several members of his family – after the Soviets gained control of the capital city of Kabul. Only several days later was the new puppet leader even brought into Afghanistan by the Soviets.
This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world.
This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people.
We must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace. A Soviet-occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a steppingstone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies.
The United States wants all nations in the region to be free and to be independent. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic, and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed. This would threaten the security of all nations including, of course, the United States, our allies, and our friends.
Therefore, the world simply cannot stand by and permit the Soviet Union to commit this act with impunity. Fifty nations have petitioned the United Nations Security Council to condemn the Soviet Union and to demand the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
. . . [N]either the United States nor any other nation which is committed to world peace and stability can continue to do business as usual with the Soviet Union.
I have already recalled the United States Ambassador from Moscow back to Washington. He’s working with me and with my other senior advisers in an immediate and comprehensive evaluation of the whole range of our relations with the Soviet Union.
The successful negotiation of the SALT II treaty1 has been a major goal and a major achievement of this administration, and we Americans, the people of the Soviet Union, and indeed the entire world will benefit from the successful control of strategic nuclear weapons through the implementation of this carefully negotiated treaty.
However, because of the Soviet aggression, I have asked the United States Senate to defer further consideration of the SALT II treaty so that the Congress and I can assess Soviet actions and intentions and devote our primary attention to the legislative and other measures required to respond to this crisis. As circumstances change in the future, we will, of course, keep the ratification of SALT II under active review in consultation with the leaders of the Senate.
The Soviets must understand our deep concern. We will delay opening of any new American or Soviet consular facilities, and most of the cultural and economic exchanges currently under consideration will be deferred. Trade with the Soviet Union will be severely restricted. . . .
Along with other countries, we will provide military equipment, food, and other assistance to help Pakistan defend its independence and its national security against the seriously increased threat it now faces from the north. The United States also stands ready to help other nations in the region in similar ways.
Neither our allies nor our potential adversaries should have the slightest doubt about our willingness, our determination, and our capacity to take the measures I have outlined tonight. I have consulted with leaders of the Congress, and I am confident they will support legislation that may be required to carry out these measures.
History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease. . . .
After the American Revolution, people shared an increased awareness of political matters and were highly cognizant of issues such as equality and liberty.
The best explanation for the migration patterns shown on the map is that emancipated slaves left the South to escape radical discrimination and to seek economic opportunities in the North and West, in a process known as Great Migration.
The Great Migration was a migration of about 2 million African Americans from the rural areas of the southern United States to the industrial cities of the north, northeast and west in the decades between 1900 and 1930. It was one of the central events in the history of African Americans in the 20th century. Most blacks came from the rural states of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. They created larger African-American communities in cities such as New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Omaha, Indianapolis, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh, some of which even have an African-American majority today. This migration was caused mainly because of the failure of Reconstruction, which ended with a white regain of power in Southern states, with a consequent decline in rights that African-Americans had won after the Civil War.
<em>The correct answer is option C,</em> the Gupta empire, today India, reached its greatest size under the reign Samudra Gupta.
The inscriptions in the Allahabad Pillar, one of the columns known as of Ashoka which are a series of pillars spread throughout the Indian subcontinent, credit <em>Samudragupta</em>, son of the Licchavi princess Kumaradevi and the Gupta emperor Chandragupta, with extensive military conquests, suggesting that he defeated several kings of northern India, and annexed their territories to his empire, which contributed to this empire's notable expansion.
