Cold War

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The twentieth century witnesses two of the world worst of all wars. The first and second world wars left millions of people around the globe dead and an unprecedented destruction of property. In the period that ensued following the end of the Second World War, many nations were devastated. A lot of their property had been destroyed and people killed. It was a time of reconstruction. However, in the interim years of the Second World War, a new form of war quite unusual ensued. A war of ideologies arose between two major powers that had emerged after the Second World War - the Soviet Union and the U.S. This war came to be known as the Cold War. The cold war was a complex phenomenon because it rarely entailed armed battles. One ultimate consequence of the Cold War was the collapse of the Soviet Union. While that may have been the end result, this paper argues that the major goal of the Cold War was not defeat the Soviet Union.
In order to understand better how the collapse of the Soviet Union came about, it is important to place this war in its historical context by examine its causes and consequences. In so doing, it will emerge that the major participants of the Cold War, the US and the USSR fought in an ideological battle of supremacy. Each of the nations wanted to dominate and thus, each fought to influence other like-minded states to support it in its course (Reim 53). It was just unfortunate that the strategies of the Communist USSR did not work out, and the U.S. and its capitalist ideology triumphed in the end. This saw the disintegration of the fifteen states that formed the USSR.

The term Cold War initially used by the British writer George Orwell in 1945 in an attempt to express the worldview, beliefs and social struc...

... middle of paper ...

...iet Union collapsed. Such a fall was only a consequence of the country’s inability to convince its forming states, as well as its lack of dominance in economic and military issues. It was not the ultimate goal of the Cold War, but only a consequence of the war.

Works Cited

Leffler, Melvyn and Odd Arne Vestad. The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume 1. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Print.
Concklin, Wendy. The Cold War: The 20 Century. New York: Teacher Created Materials, 2007. Print.
Reim, Melanie. The Cold War. New York: Twenty-First Century Books, 2003. Print.
Strayer, Robert. Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? Understanding Historical Change. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 198. Print.
Arnold, James and Robert Weiner. Cold War: The Essential Reference Guide. New York: ABC- CLIO, 2012. Print.
Coldwar.org. The Fall of the Soviet Union. 2013. Web. 7 December 2013.

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