The Cold War: Communism Vs Capitalism

The Cold War was a state of economic, diplomatic, and ideological discord among nations without armed conflict. The Cold War was between the United States and the USSR because these were the two major powers after WWII. Basically, the Cold War was a series of proxy wars that had taken place back in time involving surrounding countries. One of the main causes for Cold War was that the Soviet Union was spreading communism and the United States didn’t like that so they were trying to contain communism. However, in the end they failed. Many events took place in other countries. In Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and China, communism took over; however, before it did, major wars had taken place. The cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union worsened the condition of countries involved. The Cold War broke countries into two parts that turned against each other, the United States and the Soviet Union used these countries to fight their war and caused a big disturbance to daily life, and the Communist States fought the Non-Communist States; however, the end results of these wars only caused more damage in these countries.

During World War II, the United States and the Soviets put their political differences aside in their need to defeat their common foe, Germany. However, even during the war against Germany, and later Japan, the political and post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviets were ever underlying and continued to grow. As both sides of the Axis allies continued to gain ground, during their victories in Europe, the questions and positioning for future world domination of political ideals continued to mount up. Shortly after Germany surrendered, the issues began to come to light at the Potsdam Conference that was attended by the current British, American, and Soviet leaders. After the use of the atomic bombs and Japan’s surrender,

The Cold War, in one sense, was a power struggle between the two nuclear military giants of the age, the United States and the Soviet Union. But on a more basic level, the Cold War was a contest between two opposing ways of life. One was democratic capitalism, whose leading representatives were the United States and the nations of Western Europe. The other was totalitarian Communism, the system of the Soviet Union and its "satellite" nations in Eastern Europe. Between 1945 and 1990, despite constant tensions and an alarming buildup of nuclear arms on both sides, the United States and the Soviet Union officially remained at peace—hence the name the "cold" war. Yet it was hardly a peaceful era. Furthermore through newspapers in USSR (Pravda and

Throughout United States history, there has not been a more prominent and long lasting threat like the one of communism. It has been a threat to the democratic and capitalist ideals of the U.S. since before World War I, throughout the Cold War and is still until this day. When one thinks about communism, you conjure up images of the Red Scare that the Soviet Union induced and of other dictatorships throughout the western hemisphere and one might overlook the Marxist ideals that were being spread throughout our neighboring countries. These western countries were allies that the U.S. could not afford to lose during the Cold War. Latin America, which has many ties to the U.S., both geographically and politically, could pose a very strategic threat to the U.S. in its battle against communism. To understand Latin America’s communist history is to understand how much influence and intervention the U.S. had in the region during the Cold War. This report will serve to explain how communism spread to the western hemisphere, why the U.S. government had to stop that spread, and how they were able to stop many communist revolutions in Latin America.

The Cold War was easy: Capitalism vs. Communism, West vs. East, Good vs. Evil… however you wanted to define it, the dichotomy was simple to understand. When the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, the New World Order was going to be a little more difficult to define, and to comprehend.

The author of The Devil We Knew wrote this book from a standpoint of displeasure at the way the government handled the Cold War. I believe that H.W. Brands was not alone in this feeling of the government failing its people. The Cold War was the third war in a very short period of time. During the first two wars 100,000 Americans and millions of non-Americans were slaughtered. The feeling of continuous war and death to simply be in another war was more than some people could stand (VI). Thus, their fear took on the image of communists, they became the scapegoat for everything we feared.

The U.S. has considered Communism the greatest threat before and after WW2 and the civil war. It also worked very well in China. During the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy unfairly accused a number of innocent people of being communist and traitors.

The Cold War period represented a breaking point for real and potential threats against the US hegemony in Latin America. The US and the Soviet Union had a power struggle for almost all the last half of the twentieth century, and even if the political and military tension was between those two blocks, the poor relationship’s collateral damage reached the rest of countries in the American continent with the anti-communism US foreign policy.

The United State’s was not subtle in their distain for communism and the Soviet Union; they fanned the ideological flames between capitalism and communism rather than putting them out. Directly after the war the US created the Marshall Plan, where they gave $13 billion to European states. In President Truman’s speech ‘The Truman Doctrine’ he talks about Greece and Turkey and threatens if aid is not given, Greece’s democracy will be under threat by armed men supported by communists. This was a strategic ploy to prevent communism, by allowing capitalism to flourish. Full-employment leaves people happy, and accepting of capitalism and less likely to turn to radical communism. However the Soviet Union was not impressed with this because they believed that capitalism was the root of fascism, and their allied states declined the funding.

-The Cold War is one of the most complicating yet interesting topics in history. It was an altercation between the Soviet Union and the United States over different ideologies concerning politics. Russia believed in communism which was the ideology of advocating class war and believing that all property was publicly owned (Sherman, 2004). Each person is given or gets paid however much they need. Everything was owned by the government and divided equally among the people who eventually worked for what they got. This was totalitarian. The United States had a capitalist economy. This was an economical system where a country's industry and their trade is controlled by a private owner for profit not by the state. It followed the idea that people

The conflict in ideologies between capitalism and communism resulted in one of the greatest conflicts of the twentieth century. The belief that freedom and democracy would die under communist rule caused the United States to start a conflict that would last for decades. The decisions made by the United States in W.W.II caused tensions to rise between the U. S. and the Soviet Union. Fear of Communism in capitalist nations, caused the United states government to use propaganda to raise Cold War anxieties. Furthermore, the American media influenced the attitudes of Americans, making a hatred of communism spread though the nation. Thus, the United States caused the conflict known as the Cold War, through its political policy and propaganda. The political relations going on in Europe during and directly after World War II had an enormous effect on laying the foundation for the Cold War. War time conferences such as Yalta and Terhran harshened the relationship between the communists and the capitalists. At the end of W.W.II American policy towards the Soviets changed drastically. The change in president in 1945 caused relations with Russia to worsen. Furthermore, other political contributions to the Cold War entailed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. The division of Europe between the west and east drew physical borders which outlined that the war of misinformation that had began. Also treaties of the post war world further separated the two super powers

After the Cold War, the United States (US) and Soviet Union remained the top two superpowers. As the Cold War progressed, the ideological battle was often fought in countries that held little physical strategic value. One such country was Vietnam, an Indochina region that was historically under French control. During the 1960’s and 70’s, however, there was also influence by China over Vietnam. The Soviet Union attempted to gain control within third world countries as well. Consequently, since the US adopted a protectionist attitude toward the world, they had no choice but to intervene as well. While this relatively insignificant location was an obscure location for the US to attack, it fit perfectly into the context of the cold war. As an ideological battle for supremacy, the US felt that it was integral to offer relentless support to the anti-communist forces in an effort to undermine the influence of both China and the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Communist presence in the third world was also important to the Soviets throughout the cold war. Despite facing domestic problems and a resilient Northern Vietnamese opponent, the United States and Lyndon b. Johnson persisted in fighting a war of attrition mainly due to strong international political pressure to support democracy and eliminate communism.

When the cold war began, no one thought that it would last as long as it did. Many people thought the war was caused by fighting, and there were some people that thought it was caused by the conflicts of communism and capitalism, so who was right? Well we only know what we read in our history books which says that it was caused by the conflicts of communism and capitalism. Was this the real reason for the cold war? In my essay I will give details about the cold war and tell why the war was started, who started the war, what doctrines were put in place to keep the Soviet Union from spreading communism, and how the Cold War impacted the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

The cold war can be described as a state of political, military and economic tension between the western world and its democratic ideals and Eastern Europe who shared that communist ideology. It was however lead mainly by the two super powers that rose at the end of the Second World War, the United States and the USSR. The War put a lot of pressure on both Britain and France in terms of their economic and military resources as they were still recovering from the consequences of the First World War and so left them drained towards the end of the Second World War when Germany was defeated. The US and the Soviet Union were the only countries left who still held a significant amount of power and so the rise in their power inevitably lead to

The Cold War was a war of ideologies - Capitalism and Communism. The war lasted from roughly 1947 to 91 and was majorly between two of the biggest super powers of the time. The United States’ capitalistic views clashed with the Soviet Union’s communist ones. The war arose from suspicion, anxiety, and a nuclear arms race. As the U.S. battled the spread of the Soviet Union’s influence, America had to deal with it’s own issues concerning communism. Strain between the countries grew to a breaking point and the Cuban Missile Crisis is a perfect example of that. The world and society we will in today is and will continue to be affected by the Cold War and the consequences of it.