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Cold War Politics: Shaped By The Global Economic Crises of the USA and USSR

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One of the most remarkable events in the early history at the end of the twentieth century was the period post Second World War also known as Cold War. The Cold War began in 1945, leaving the door open for the search of the world dominance between the two most powerful countries at that time: The United States of America (USA) and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This struggle for power had to be developed under the fluctuating economic conditions of the age. Even though, the world economy was facing a critical stage due to the variable price of the oil and other economic effects such as unemployment and inflation not only in the USA, but also in the USSR; both empires had to make enormous efforts to demonstrate his …show more content…

Meanwhile, the USSR had managed to maintain a stable economic condition due to the profitability of the steel industry and oil production. ‘In 1974, […], the Soviet Union exported 60 million tonnes of oil and petroleum products to Eastern Europe at a price ranging from $16 to $20 per tonne. […] which meant an annual subsidy of $3 billion to the Warsaw Pact allies in energy supplies alone’ (Walker 1994, p.280). Russia also took advantage of the fact that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporters Countries (OPEC) and the Arab world had applied sanctions through oil embargoes to the USA for his support and participation in the recently Yom Kippur war (1973) in defense of Israel, and started to improve their offensive capability by investing one-third of their GNP in armament. To sum up this decade, one could think that by the end of the 1970s, the USSR visualized the opportunity to gain more terrain in the military and an outstanding chance to leave the USA out of the panorama for an eventual control of the global power.
By the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan was elected as president of the USA. Reagan was described as a consistent person and according to LeFeber (1985, p.302) ‘[His] consistency included hatred for the Soviets (that “evil empire” he called them) and a massive military buildup’. Reagan started an aggressive

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