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The Story of The Everlasting Cold War Between The West and The East
After the end of the Second World War II, The United States became a powerful, respected empire and kicked off with the determination to maintain the success of its military and its economy. Its past experiences with wars and its effective diplomatic influences inserted disquieting concerns in the heart of the Soviet Union that has held the ideology of communist expansion close to its heart. In this paper, the focus is to discuss the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and how it led the United States to enter a non-conventional war named the Cold War that manifested itself in myriad occasions. Although, many believe the Cold War had ended, my purpose is to address this perception and show that the Cold War is still present.
Definition
What exactly is the Cold War? My definition is a feral war where and when the 2 enemies don’t fight each other directly with missiles and highly developed combat equipment, instead they fight behind the curtains, under different titles, and using different causes. Most people do not judge the Cold War analytically, and they believe that it has a time stamp, which ended a long time ago. I find it necessary to shed light that the reality is otherwise and that the Cold War has no ending as long as there are two juggernaut powers that compete to shape the world according to their political and economic culture and standards.
The Conflict of Ideologies Is The Reason Why It All Started
In 1946, The United States governed part of east Germany and was looking to expand its popular economic systems that was based on capitalism and liberalism. In brief, these mentioned political/economic systems encourage private o...
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...s of terrorism, democracy, and freedom in a Muslim country where democracy is a foreign term to the Syrians people. Syria is today’s phase of the Cold War.
Bibliography
Bellamy, Paul. 2010. "The Last Cold War? Thoughts on Resolving Korea's Sixty Year-old Family Feud." Journal Of Human Security (RMIT Training Pty Ltd Trading As RMIT Publishing) 6, no. 2: 1-6. International Security & Counter Terrorism Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed May 18, 2014).
Evered, K. (n.d.). The Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey: America’s Cold. Retrieved May 17, 2014, from http://www.researchgate.net/publication/260192194_The_Truman_Doctrine_in_Greece_and_Turkey_Americas_Cold_War_fusion_of_development_and_security
Henretta, James A, and Davis Brody. "An Emerging World Power." In America: A Concise History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010
A war does not necessarily require physical weapons to fight. From 1947 to 1991, military tension and ideological conflicts held place. Cold War is defined as a state of political hostility existing between countries, characterized by threats, violent propaganda, subversive activities, and other measures short of open warfare, in particular. The causes of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union were the mutual distrust that had taken place in World War II, intense rivalry between the two super powers, and conflicting ideologies. The two superpowers differed in views of political and economic principles and were eager to spread their ideologies to other countries.
The Cold War was the most important historic event in the 20th century after the Second World War, from 1945 till 1991 between two most powerful countries in that period – Soviet Union and USA. The Cold War invested a lot in world politics. What is the Cold War? This was a war for dominance in the world. In 1945 the USA was the only one country in the world that had the nuclear weapons. But in the 1949 USSR started to learn their nuclear weapons. In further developments forced the USSR was soon created by nuclear, and then thermonuclear weapons. (Isaacs J, 2008) Fight has become very dangerous for all.
Bostdorff, D. M. (2008). Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: the Cold War call to arms. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.
The Cold War was a post-World War II struggle between the United States. and its allies and the group of nations led by the Soviet Union. Direct military conflict did not occur between the two superpowers, but intense economic and diplomatic struggles erupted in the country. Different interests led to mutual suspicion and hostility in a rising philosophy. The United States played a major role in the ending of the Cold War.
Discussions of the causes of the Cold War are often divisive, creating disparate ideological camps that focus the blame in different directions depending on the academic’s political disposition. One popular argument places the blame largely on the American people, whose emphasis on “strength over compromise” and their deployment of the atomic bomb in the Second World War’s Pacific theatre apparently functioned as two key catalysts to the conflict between US and Soviet powers. This revisionist approach minimizes Stalin’s forceful approach and history of violent leadership throughout World War 2, and focuses instead on President Harry Truman’s apparent insensitivity to “reasonable Soviet security anxieties” in his quest to impose “American interests on the world.” Revisionist historians depict President Truman as a “Cold War monger,” whose unjustified political use of the atomic bomb and ornery diplomatic style forced Russia into the Cold War to oppose the spread of a looming capitalist democratic monopoly. In reality, Truman’s responsibility for the Cold War and the atomic bomb drop should be minimized.
The Soviet Union began to view the United States as a threat to communism, and the United States began to view the Soviet Union as a threat to democracy. On March 12, 1947, Truman gave a speech in which he argued that the United States should support nations trying to resist Soviet imperialism. Truman and his advisors created a foreign policy that consisted of giving reconstruction aid to Europe, and preventing Russian expansionism. These foreign policy decisions, as well as his involvement in the usage of the atomic bomb, raise the question of whether or not the Cold War can be blamed on Truman. Supporting the view that Truman was responsible for the Cold War, Arnold Offner argues that Truman’s parochialism and nationalism caused him to make contrary foreign policy decisions without regard to other nations, which caused the intense standoff between the Soviet Union and America that became the Cold War (Offner 291)....
There have been many attempts to explain the origins of the Cold War that developed between the capitalist West and the communist East after the Second World War. Indeed, there is great disagreement in explaining the source for the Cold War; some explanations draw on events pre-1945; some draw only on issues of ideology; others look to economics; security concerns dominate some arguments; personalities are seen as the root cause for some historians. So wide is the range of the historiography of the origins of the Cold War that is has been said "the Cold War has also spawned a war among historians, a controversy over how the Cold War got started, whether or not it was inevitable, and (above all) who bears the main responsibility for starting it" (Hammond 4). There are three main schools of thought in the historiography: the traditional view, known alternatively as the orthodox or liberal view, which finds fault lying mostly with the Russians and deems security concerns to be the root cause of the Cold War; the revisionist view, which argues that it is, in fact, the United States and the West to blame for the Cold War and not the Russians, and cites economic open-door interests for spawning the Cold War; finally, the post-revisionist view which finds fault with both sides in the conflict and points to issues raised both by the traditionalists as well as the revisionists for combining to cause the Cold War. While strong arguments are made by historians writing from the traditionalist school, as well as those writing from the revisionist school, I claim that the viewpoint of the post-revisionists is the most accurate in describing the origins of the Cold War.
With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field.
The cold war era is when America was at its most suspicious and paranoid. The cold war grew out of tensions that were post WWII. Two worldly super powers clashed over rivalry and one wanted to have more influence. This rivalry went for almost half of the 20th century, and led to many international incidents that almost brought both powers to a mutual destruction.
The Cold War began in 1946, shortly after WWII, and ended more than four decades later in 1991. It began with the shifting struggle for power and prestige between the Western hemisphere and the Soviet Union. The U.S. and President Harry Truman fear of communist attack and the Soviet Union need for a secure western border led to America’s effort in providing economic stability and security to nations of the Western hemisphere. In addition, President Truman began his “Get Tough” policy that encouraged the development of nuclear weapons for America to be securely defensive and well armed. The document, “Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace Questions the “Get Tough” Policy” written by Secretary Wallace described America’s actions, “the effort to secure air base spread over half the globe from which the other half of the globe can be bombed,” which he felt America during the Cold War went “far beyond the requirements of defense.”Although, President Truman was determined to resist aggression, moreover, stop the spread of communism and Soviet power, the document was written to make the public and particularly President Truman realize that he himself used aggressive diplomacy that failed to notice the Soviet Union purpose and policy, which if he did understood, might have made better approaches in achieving his goals.
The Cold War was an argument between the Soviet Union and the United States of America after WWII. During WWII the USA and the Soviet Union were allies fighting a common cause: Adolph Hitler who was attempting to overthrow the surrounding countries. Although the USA and the Soviet Union were allies, the relationship between the two countries was very tense (What Was). Neither country trusted the other. After WWII their relationship became even more tense due to the building of new weapons capable of destroying entire countries.
Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signified, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold but not clothed." There was never a war that this idea can be more correct applied to than the Cold War. According to noted author and Cold War historian Walter Lippman, the Cold War can be defined as a state of tension between states, which behave with great distrust and hostility towards each other, but do not resort to violence. The Cold War encompasses a period from the end of the Second World War (WWII), in 1945, to the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1989. It also encompassed the Korean and Vietnam Wars and other armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, that, essentially, were not wars for people but instead for territories and ideologies. "Nevertheless, like its predecessors, the Cold War has been a worldwide power contest in which one expanding power has threatened to make itself predominant, and in which other powers have banded together in a defensive coalition to frustrate it---as was the case before 1815, as was the case in 1914-1918 as was the case from 1939-1945" (Halle 9). From this power contest, the Cold War erupted.
Tomkinson, John L. (2008) The Cold War: Themes in Twentieth Century World History for the International Baccalaureate. 3rd edition. Athens: Anagnosis.
Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Robert J. Lieber. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002. 152-172.
According to the conventional Western view, the Cold War was a conflict between two superpowers, caused by Soviet aggression, in which the U.S. tried to contain the Soviet Union and protect the world from it.