Why the Cold War Ended
This is an excerpt from the paper...
This research paper explains what is meant by the end of the Cold War and how and why it ended. The end of the Cold War encompasses a combination of events, the most important of which was the cessation of the confrontation and competition of the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and their allies, including nuclear disarmament, the withdrawal of Soviet military powerfrom Central Europe, the toppling of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Soviet communist government and economic system. Many internal and external factors contributed to this result, but the most important were the internal centrifugal forces unleashed by the policies of the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev. In his 1947 article on the Sources of Soviet Conduct, which was an important contribution to the formulation of American policy at the inception of the Cold War, George Kennan remarked with considerable prescience: "the possibility remains (and in the opinion of the writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power . . . bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced" (La Feber "America in" 744). This was not self-evident at the time Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. The Bolsheviks seized power by revolution in 1917 and, after winning the Civil War of 1918-1921, their monopoly of political power o
. . .
and glasnost (greater openness culturally and politically), and adopted a policy of easing tensions with the West.
Gorbachev largely succeeded at first in achieving his principal foreign policy objective, which was to allay suspicions in the West so that he could reduce defense expenditures and concentrate on the reform of the Soviet economy. He withdrew Soviet forces from Africa and Afghanistan and reduced aid to Cuba and Nicaragua. By 1989 he had negotiated the principal terms of the Start Treaty and in 1990 the Central Front Europe Treaty which led, respectively, to very large mutual reductions in nuclear arms and the withdrawal of conventional forces from Central Europe.
However, the United States posed a dilemma for the Soviet Union. Through the arms buildup and strategic forces modernization program of the Reagan administration, "the Soviet Union was . . . confronted not only with a costly arms race when it needed huge capital investments at home, but also a high-tech arms race when it could not even keep up with contemporary Western technology" (Spanier 347). By 1986, the Soviet Union was spending 16-25 percent of its GNP on defense, as compared with six percent in the United States and three percent in Western Europe
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Brzezinski Marxist-Leninist, Cold War, Spanier Soviet, Republics Baltics, Robert Heilbroner, Union Kennan, West Gorbachev, George Kennan, soviet union, cold war, la feber, soviet economy, soviet system, eastern europe, spanier 347, political economic, soviet power, la feber walter, economic liberalization,
Approximate Word count = 1497
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Why the Cold War Ended
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
