Cold war

Cold war

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures relating to the different aspects of Cold War. This war was the decade, long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, especially characterized by its constant tensions, arms escalation, and lack of direct warfare. First coined by author George Orwell to describe a state of permanent and irresolvable war, cold war was applied to the U.S., Soviet conflict in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, the U.S. representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission and influential adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both sides often phrased the conflict as one between capitalism and communism, not simply between two states. Picking its endpoints requires some arbitrary choices, but it essentially lasted from shortly after World War II to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Discussion & Analysis

Long before even the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there were significant differences between Russia and the West, Russia was a latecomer to capitalism, abolishing serfdom only in 1861, and the transition was an awkward one that created enough ill will to make a radical revolution appealing. Before the 20th century, Russia's imperial designs threatened those of Great Britain, a maritime rival, and Spain, which encouraged settlement in California out of fear those Russian colonists, would settle the west coast traveling south from Alaska. In both cases the Western nations may have been exaggerating or misperceiving the extent of Russia's expansionist interests, just as was likely the case with Western perceptions of the Soviet Union during the cold war.

World War II had broken the faith that the Soviet Union had in the rest of the world's willingness to leave communist states alone, and so Stalin sought to spread communism to neighboring countries in eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Poland, but remained uninvolved with communist interests in Finland, Greece, and Czechoslovakia, at least directly. Winston Churchill was the first to refer to this band of communist countries as the "Iron Curtain," referring not only to the fortified borders between the capitalist and communist nations of Europe but to the Soviet Union's protective layer of communist states shielding it from capitalist Europe.

For the first few decades after World War II, the dominant focus of U.S. foreign policy was that of "containment"; the U.S. took pains to limit communist and Soviet influence to the states where it was already present and to prevent its "leaking out" to others. When civil war broke out in China, the Soviet Union aided the Communists, and the United States armed and funded the Nationalists. The new People's Republic of China, formed on October 1, 1949, became a valuable Soviet ally, while the Nationalists took control of the island of Taiwan, from where they retained their seat in the United Nations. The Soviets boycotted the United Nations Security Council as a result, and so were unable to veto Truman's request for UN aid in prosecuting an attack on ...