The Cold War: Why Did The Cold War End?

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Recommended: The role of Ronald Reagan in the ending of the Cold War

Why did the Cold War end?
In 1946, George Orwell foretold that “the Russian regime will either democratize itself or it will perish”. He was one of the first to predict the fate the Soviet Union, and yet, when it occurred, “the abrupt end of the Cold War … and the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union astonished almost everyone, whether in government, the academy, the media, or the think tanks” (Gladdis 1992). The Cold War’s sudden end can be attributed to a number of tensions which, occurring simultaneously, diminished the once-extraordinary power of the USSR.
Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had risen fast since the end of World War II, were spurred on by the Space Race and the Arms Race, and peaked dangerously …show more content…

The response of US President Ronald Reagan has often been cited as a contributor to the end of the Cold War: he introduced a number of anti-communist policies including the Reagan Doctrine (in which the USA would aid anti-communist movements) and the Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as ‘Star Wars’, a missile strategy, intended to resurrect competition and diminish the Soviet economy) and negotiated arms reductions with the Soviet leaders. Some argue his actiosn left the Soviet Union “completely defeated by the USA, economically [and] technologically” (Gorum 2014) and hence were a major factor in ending the cold war. Mike Bowker (1997) suggests this view is an exaggeration, and that Reagan in fact “changed very little on the ground and certainly was not sufficient to explain the radical change”. He proposes instead that the cause for change was primarily the “new thinking” of Mikhail …show more content…

The Cold War, then, would fit the realist view of the world: states, by nature, are self-serving. But it does not fit in its entirety, as realism expects that the world is “condemned to perpetual great power competition” (Baylis, Smith & Owens 2011). Following this theory, the Cold War should have ended because one state defeated the other, but – and this is what stumped the political theorists – contrary to what the realist view expects, the USSR collapsed without a fight and almost entirely of its own accord. If the Cold War proved realism wrong, perhaps a goal of harmony throughout the world was not such an implausible idea.
The end of the Cold War does not have an exact date, but by August 1991, the threat of an expansionist Soviet Union had deteriorated, as a result of the culmination of overwhelming long run economic stagnation alongside many internal and external political and social tensions. But this was not just the end of a rivalry between two superpowers: this brought forth the possibility that world peace was not so far from

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