Cold War Case Essay

The Cold struggle was a strife between the USA and the Soviet join. It led to the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons, twain universal joint ideologies in conflict, and two different self-images, the unify States championing a universe made safe for democracy. Its opponent, the Soviet center advocated creation Communism.The coupled States prides itself on its heritage of freedom, a refuge for persecuted religious groups, a land of liberty that successfully rebelled against the empurpled power of Britain in 1776. Its guiding principles were the protection of the individuals life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and the face of a constitution that embodied the best political idea of modern times, a system of checks and balances so that the president, Congress or parliament and judiciary or Supreme Court shared power, checking each differents work to guard against dictatorship.While the United States did not al miens live up to its ideals, nonetheless, on paper at le ast, it looked good compared to its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Led by a murderous dictator, Joseph Stalin (1928 to 1953), the Soviet government was brutal, outlawing all op maculation, banned political parties opposed to the Communist Party, murdered millions and set up a vast prison camp system known as the Gulag. In the years 1937-38 alone, Stalin reproducible the execution of one million citizens of the Soviet Union.In the fifty years of the Cold War, the United States only when executed two of its own citizens, the husband and wife Rosenberg spy team. Even though the Rosenbergs should not commit been executed because their crimes were tiny in the context of the Civil War, the difference between the United States and the Soviet Union in terms of political mass murder of its own citizens is obvious. despite this fact, one third of the man went the Communist way and other countries were tempted by the promises of Communism. How could this be?In theory, Communism promis ed a more match world and at its greatest extent in the 1970s, Communist governments ruled one third of the worlds people. These were mostly poor countries looking for a quick way to industrialise. These countries looked upon the United States as a champion of the rich and powerful, an exploitative superpower that exported its economicalal system of capitalism only because it suited its interests to do so.Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States strides the world as the sole superpower. The United States maintains its bewitch on this unipolar world without having to make too much effort. The United States spends only about 5-6% of its prudence (its gross national product) on defense. The Soviet Union spent somewhere between 20% and 33% of its economy to try to keep up with the United States during the Cold War. It couldnt keep up the pace. The position of the United States has declined only slightly in the twentieth carbon. In 1928, its economy was fou r times the surface of its nearest rival (France) and in 1950 its economy was three times the size of its nearest rival (the Soviet Union).It is not just a question of economic or military power. American sprouts and popular medicinal drug dominated the mass culture of the world from World War One to the present day. In 1994, the biggest-selling film in Austria, France, Germany, Argentina and Mexico was the The Lion King, an American cartoon. The Flinstones was the best-selling film in Poland and Turkey. Forrest Gump won Finland and Norway. It is important to think of that power is projected and wars can be won not just by military and economic means but also by winning what is now an international culture war.A disinclined empire? The United States expanded its frontier in North America through with(predicate)out the eighteenth century and after victory over Spain in 1898 became a maritime power whose empire stretched as farthermost west as the Philippines. Ever since the Mo nroe Doctrine of 1823, the United States has pledged itself to pr counterbalancet the atomic number 63an powers from intervening in the western hemisphere, specifically Latin America. Following its victory over Spain in 1898, the unshackled States arrived as a world power.For many Native Americans and African-American slaves, some of the rhetoric of freedom did not ring true. however Americas promise of freedom and opportunity attracted migrants from all over the world. They arrived in New York at the rate of a million a year in the early 1900s. As a number of Europes self-destruction in World War One (1914-18), the United States became the dominant economic and political power in the world. It would later describe itself as a reluctant empire, a pop state whose aim was to spread its ideals over the world but not to control in the way that European empires had done in the past. But what would it do with this power?Britain and France, weakened by the loss of Russia through revolu tion, were able to overcome Germany only with Americas help. Wilson believed that the values of the United States were in fact universal values of slumber and democracy. In 1918 Woodrow Wilson, the American president published his Fourteen Points which called for a democratic peace based on the rights of self determination of all nations and the setting up of an international body, the League of Nations, to figure conflicts.But the world was changing. In Russia in 1917 Lenin and his Communist Party had come to power. Even worse for Wilson, his ideas were jilted in his own country, the United States. Wilson was pleased that the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One launch a League of Nations, but then found that the United States would not join. The League of Nations was rejected by the Senate, the upper house of the US Congress. Instead the Untied States tried to secure its future through the majuscule Conference of 1921-22 which agreed that the US Navy should be of equ al strength to the largest navy in the world, the British.In the 1920s and 30s, American foreign policy was dominated by isolationism, a refusal to intervene in Europe even when fasicsts, nazis and communists were on the march against American-style democracy in Europe. Those who support American power in the world today still worry that if the rest of the world criticises the United States too much it will put out into its shell again and leave Europe and Australia at the mercy of a new (presumably Asian) religious fascim.Despite or because of its spectacular economic growth, American capitalism hit a major snag in the Great falloff that began in 1929 and economic problems increased the whim of isolationism in the US public, that is a mood of cutting the United States off from the worlds troubles. The president to take the US out of the Depression was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who introduced his New Deal. It was Roosevelt who would take the USA into the Second World War but only af ter lacquer attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941, putting an end to the argument for isolation. The USA suffered more than three deoxycytidine monophosphate thousand deaths in World War Two, mostly soldiers. But as in World War One this was a relatively small price to pay for what was a huge victory. The Soviet Union now under Joseph Stalin lost 27-30 million people, the majority of which were civilians.At the end of world War Two, the United States had a new and powerful weapon, the atomic bomb that it had to used to force japan to surrender in 1945. Under president Truman from 1945-52, the United States staked out a new role as the worlds policeman whose task it was to protect the democratic and free West from the tyranny of Stalins Communism in the Soviet Union.The United States would win the Cold War, in large part because of its continuing economic success. On the eve of its collapse in 1990, the GNP of the Soviet Union was approximately one third of that of the USA, even though th e United States and the Soviet Union had almost identical population sizes.The secret to Americas success? Unlike the Soviet Union, which experimented with a new and untried economic model of a state-rune economy, the Untied States had a proven economic model of capitalism. It had its faults such as inequality and crises of unemployment but encouraged groundwork and efficiency in a way that the Soviet system did not.