The Cold War was a worldwide conflict that went on for over 40 years. Many people today do not understand how much it cost in terms of lives and money. During the Cold War, many events helped shape today’s United State’s military, foreign relations, and policies. The Cuban Missile Crisis helped prove that the US was a strong nation. The Space Race helped technology advance and allowed man to go where we had never been before. Another well-known conflict was the Vietnam War, which started long before the US got involved. France lost the first Indochina war to the Vietminh. Soon after, Communist North Vietnam showed interest in invading Capitalist South Vietnam and the country eventually split in two. At the time, the US had political representation in South Vietnam. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the US military became activists and sent over 50,000 troops to fight (Murray, 13). Those troops endured horrors no one could imagine, including new weapon advances such as Agent Orange and Napalm that were used to clear forests and fight. Back in the US, many people protested the war with rallies and marches. They had a reason. The United States was not justified in entering the Vietnam conflict because it caused more damage than advances for the US.
After WWII ended, the United States entered into a war that lasted for over four decades, and was unlike any war we had fought previously. Not a single shot was fired, because the cold war was a war fought with the threat of annihilation by both sides. This war was a war between the United States and the USSR, the Soviet Union. The purported reason behind the cold war was that both countries, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had very different kinds of government, the Soviet Union’s communism, and the United States democracy. Each country believed their form of government would be the best government for the whole world and their types of government were very different. The Communists formed the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the effort to begin a revolution for the purpose of overthrowing capitalism. Lenin and Stalin set up a totally state controlled economy. Due to the fact that socialism and capitalism are so opposite from democracy, the United States believed this form of government was a threat to the American freedom and way of life.
During the 1960s through the 1990s the United States was involved in a diplomatic standoff with the Soviet Union. Both nations were preparing nuclear weapons to immediate the other. Throughout the world communism was being spread by the power Soviet forces and the United States created the Truman Doctrine to stop the spread of communism in Turkey and Greece. They continued to combat the spread through wars and “rebellions”. Through the extent of the Cold War, the United States made it their mission to stop the spread of communism. This plan both worked and failed in diplomacy throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Introduction
When World War II finally came to a close on May 7, 1945, a new war was just beginning. The Cold War symbolized the evident, yet unorthodox rivalry that stemmed between the United States and Soviet Russia, including their respective allies. (This war was fought on economic, political, and propaganda scales , with limited alternatives to weaponry, largely due to the fact that they had fear of a nuclear genocide.)^1 This expression, “The Cold War”, was initially used by Presidential Adviser, Bernard Baruch, in a “legislative debate in 1947.”("Bernard Baruch Coins the Term "Cold War"" History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Throughout the Cold War, Korean War, and Vietnam War the main problem was communism. Although the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in World War Two, during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union were known as enemies. The Soviet leaders bragged to other nations that communism would “scrape apart” free-enterprise systems around the world. This attitude angered the capitalists which led into the fifty year Cold War. The United States tried creating many tactics and strategies to contain the “bleeding” of communism, but during the cold war, communism spread faster then it could be restrained. The United States used the Marshall Plan , the Trueman Doctrine, and the Berlin Airlift to help lead people to a capitalist form of government.
On The Cold War
One of the main reasons was that there were huge differences in the
way that the East and West were led and the disagreements about this
point. The West was (still is) a democratic state where many parties
are allowed to stand and where elections are held. Secondly the
relationship between Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevalt was
untrustworthy and they disagreed about reparation and what to do with
Germany. Thirdly the reason for the breakdown is because of the Soviet
aggression in Eastern Europe. America wanted to keep Eastern Europe
contained but Stalin wanted to expand the Soviet Union.
"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." In 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower said this in reference to communism in Southeast Asia. This was later known as Eisenhower's "domino theory," although he himself never referred to it as such. Americans feared this theory would take effect in Latin America in 1959, when Fidel Castro ousted Fulgencio Batista and established a communist government in Cuba with close ties to the U.S.S.R. After the world wars, and other conflicts involving countries of the east, many Americans believed in Pan-Americanism, the belief that countries in the western hemisphere should stick together and help one another. The Cuban Revolution was considered to be a direct threat to Pan-Americanism because it was the first communist government to be established in the western hemisphere. My purpose for writing this paper is to discuss why the Bay of Pigs Invasion happened, why it was a failure, and how it effected U.S. relations with Cuba and other com...
America feared that the Soviet Union intended to spread communism to other nations and in 1947 President Harry Truman issued what would become known as the Truman Doctrine. This was a pledge that the US would help any nation resist communism in order to prevent its spread.This foreign policy centered on the "containment" of communism, both at home and abroad in an attempt to contain communism through economic and military aid. This was a demonstration to the world that the US would take an active role in world affairs. This tension between the Soviet Union and the United States became known as the Cold War and was an important cause in the Korean War. Relations between the two occupying powers of the Soviet Union and United States in North
Their cruel leader in the 1950’s, Fulgencio Batista, was overruled and instead a lawyer who led the overruling of Batista became Cuba’s leader. Fidel Castro, although loved at first, began to suspend elections, jailed or executed his opponents, and tightly controlled the press. Castro nationalized their businesses, putting the U.S.’s sugar mills and refineries to no longer belong to them. President Eisenhower made an embargo with all trade with Cuba. Needing support, Castro turned to the Soviet Union. The United States attempted to fight back, but they were humiliated by the Cubans. The Soviets viewed the United States as not being as ambitious and confident as they had first thought, so they assumed that the United States wouldn't try to stop Soviet expansion into Latin America. Soviets began to import tens of missiles into Cuba. A United States spy plane noticed these missiles. President Kennedy viewed these missiles as being too close to the continental United States, and needed to be rid of immediately. He ordered for American soldiers to invade Cuba, but instead Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s leader, agreed to not deploy the missiles if Cuba was not invaded by American
When Stalin began to invade his neighboring countries, many Americans believed that he truly was just trying to protect himself from future attacks (Document H), but it soon became evident that he just wanted the power. The United States and the Soviet Union had an alliance during World War II because they had a mutual enemy, but in truth, they were foes. As they fought against the fascist countries, their differences created more and more tension and suspicion. They worked together and defeated the fascist threat, then returned to the rocky relationship that they had initially, only that it had more animosity. Once they did not have to tolerate each other when World War II ended, they both committed actions that the other opposed with until eventually all they had was antagonism, antagonism that led to the Cold War.