Contributions to the End of the Cold War

The December of 1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union—and with it, an entire era. Like the February Revolution of 1917 that ended tsardom, the events leading up to August 1991 took place in rapid succession, with both spontaneity and, to some degree, retrospective inevitability. To understand the demise of Soviet Union is to understand the communist party-state system itself. Although the particular happenings of the Gorbachev years undoubtedly accelerated its ruin, there existed fundamental flaws within the Soviet system that would be had been proven ultimately fatal. The USSR became a past chapter of history because it was impossible to significantly reform the administrative

Ronald Reagan created a Strategic Defense Initiative that was intended to defend the United States from any nuclear weapon missile threat from other countries. This was proposed mainly to protect the U.S. from its extent threat, which was the Soviet Union at the time. Reagan wrote down in his diary addressing his Evil Empire Speech, “I did the bulk of the speech on why our arms build up was necessary and then finished with a call to the Science community to join me in research starting now to develop a defensive weapon that

Before he took office, the war was a major Communist threat to the United States. Reagan reversed the policy of détente and stood strong against the Soviet Union. His efforts were responsible for the fall of the Soviet empire that ended the Cold War. He had made the US military even stronger and established a smaller federal government. He was responsible for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which had the intent to develop an anti-ballistic missile system to prevent missile attacks from other countries, especially the Soviet Union. With the tension of the Cold War still around, the Strategic Defense Initiative was the Reagan’s response to possible nuclear attacks from afar. Although the program seemed to have no negative consequences, there were concerns brought up about the program which caused them to set it aside for a while. Reagan tranquilized the concerns by fabricating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force Treaty (INF), which provided for the destruction of about 2500 Soviet and American missiles in Europe. It banned all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe and marked a significant ending in the Cold

The final conclusion of the Cold war has created dubiety in historians which they have stayed with their doubt on viewing the perspective if president Ronald Reagan actually won the Cold War. Some historians have came upon to conclude that it was Reagan’s policies help with the war.While on the other hand, historians may say that it was the actions of Gorbachev that held lead to the end of the Cold War. During 1940-1991 the Soviet Union was already facing economic problems, in which once Reagan raised the amount of money for the arms race, the Soviet union began to struggle.Not only that but, “The conflict was a geopolitical and ideological struggle, which not only involved armies and resources, but ideas and values”(Gurney pg.1).The Cold

By 1970, the Soviet Union had achieved equality with the United States in military power. (Thayer Watkins) During the Soviet Union era Reagan came up with many tactics to ensure that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be exceeding the United States in anything. He verified that the United States had enough money for missiles and military purposes. He threatened the Soviet Union in various ways to keep control of what the Soviets were trying to accomplish. In the 1970s, the Soviets had made fast advances in Asia, Africa and South America, ending with topping off the raid of Afghanistan in 1979. The Warsaw Agreement had strong prevalence over NATO in its ordinary forces. At the time Moscow had sent out and used a new generation of intermediate-range missiles, the giant SS-20s, targeted at many European cities. Reagan developed broad counteroffensive tactics. He started a $1.5 trillion military buildup -the largest in American peacetime history- which was aimed at drawing the Soviets into a competition he was convinced they could not

With Reagan’s foreign policy, he provoked war with the soviet union by spending billions of dollars on military spending. He built new missile systems, funded covert operations against the soviet troops and allies around the globe. With Reagan as president the US spent the most in military spending in US history. Billions of dollars also went to the production of B1 and B2 bombers and missile systems. He did this because

In 1989, the world saw the fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (U.S.S.R.), which was also known as the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a block of 15 Communist Eastern European states that was ruled by one government with various puppet governments located throughout the states. Its collapse brought about new issues that the world had never had to deal with before. The fall of such a large block of Soviet states created many problems and some of the solutions that were used to solve these problems, as well as many of the tensions that were created during this time, still affect the world today. Some of the ramifications resulting from the Soviet Union’s collapse are still being felt; however, many problems have been solved

Seven American presidents over the course of 44 years engaged the Soviet Union in cold war prior to Reagan’s election in 1980. They used policies such as containment and Détente to contain Soviet aggression and win the Cold War. Ronald Reagan came to power at the pinnacle of the Cold War, following, what he saw, as the failures of Détente. Reagan was a tireless cheerleader of American patriotism in a time when America had lost faith in its national institutions and its position on the world’s stage. An ardent anti-Communist, Reagan often invoked anti-Soviet rhetoric, calling them an “Evil Empire” and challenging Soviet leadership to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. More than any other American president, Ronald Reagan took saber-rattling to a

The heart of Reagan 's foreign policy was to prevent the expansion of communism and at the heart of communism was the Soviet Union. Reagan often referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” Reagan believed that the United States should negotiate with the Soviet Union from a position of strength. The administration embarked on a modernization program which included the production of intercontinental missiles and the Strategic Defense Initiative. He increased military spending and forces, while holding negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev- the General Secretary of the Soviet Union. After a number of meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev, the two men signed an Intermediate

It can be argued that the arms build was done intentionally to further weaken the USSR’s economy. Reagan also firmly believed in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), ground based and space based weapons system implemented to protect the United States and other nations from a strategic attack from ballistic missiles. Reagan pushed that SDI was to be used as a defensive system only and hoped that its implementation would help to stop MAD. The Soviets saw the SDI as a blatant aggression on the part of the United States and feared that it would be used in a preemptive strike.

Both leaders were able to come to a “firm but fair” strategy which showed the people of their countries their “willingness to cooperate if the other side behaves cooperatively” (Knopf 2004). According to Knopf (2004), this type of strategy proves to be more successful than trying to force compliance through military intimidation. Although, President Reagan’s efforts to strengthen United States policy has received greatest attention for ending the Cold War, according to Knopf (2004), “it took three other factors to lead to the end of the Cold War” which included “grassroots activities in several countries, the coming to power of Gorbachev, and the willingness of Presidents Reagan

Americans were pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless at the turn of events in the Soviet bloc. On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. It was ruled by a single party the Communist Party that demanded the allegiance of every Russian citizen.

Moscow, U.S.S.R. 19 September, 2020. Instead of in our world when it collapsed in 1989, the Soviet Union managed to pull through the tough time, but now it couldn’t. Rioters crowded the streets, attempting to penetrate the defenses of the buildings holding state officials. Only the KGB remained loyal to its government, while the U.S.S.R.’s enemies watched smugly, and the Warsaw Pact Nations defected to NATO. A civil war in Cuba ended communism there, and Anti-Communist factions in all nations were at strong points.

The end of the Cold War brought about the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, paving the way for an unprecedented new paradigm – one characterised by the end of hostilities between the two dominant ideologies: Soviet communism and American liberal capitalism. This dominant new paradigm encouraged the homogenisation of ideas, in the form of exchanging ethos and values along former cultural, ideological and geographical divides. As such, this integration of world societies has earned the title ‘globalisation’, forcing the global community to appear so united as to warrant the metaphor of a global village. (Note: This paragraph pains me to read – I will eventually re-write it.)

The Cold War In 1945, the United States and Soviet Union were allies, triumphant in World War II, which ended with total victory for Soviet and American forces over Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire in Europe. Within a few years, yet, wartime allies became mortal enemies, locked in a global struggle—military, political, economic, ideological—to prevail in a new "Cold War. Was it the Soviets, who reneged on their agreements to allow the people of Eastern Europe to determine their own fates by imposing totalitarian rule on territories unlucky enough to fall behind the "Iron Curtain?" Or was it the Americans, who ignored the Soviets' legitimate security concerns, sought to intimidate the world with the atomic bomb, and pushed to expand their own international influence and market dominance? The tensions that would later grow into Cold War became evident as early as 1943, when the "Big Three" allied leaders—American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin—met in Tehran to coordinate strategy. Poland, which sits in an unfortunate position on the map, squeezed between frequent enemies Russia and Germany, became a topic for heated debate. The Poles, then under German occupation, had not one but two governments-in-exile—one Communist, one anticommunist—hoping to take over the country upon its liberation from the Nazis. The Big Three disagreed over which Polish faction should b allowed to take control after the war, with