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Introduction
In my essay I would like to examine the idea of Cold War being an inevitable event or an events which could have been avoided. The end of World War II was the key element, because it did created freshly minted world with the US and the USSR standing against each other as two superpowers trying to surpass one another. Another important factor was their nature, which I would like to examine more closely from the USSR point of view and of course from the US point of view. I consider understanding the nature of both countries vital in order to understand the whole meaning of the Cold War, because there is no clear definition whether the Cold War was an inevitable event or not. Both sides will blame each other for being responsible for the increased tension in Europe that lasted for more than 45 years, but the truth is there is no clear guilty party, it all depends on your point of view and in this essay, I will present my perspective and my opinion regarding this topic.
I would also like to mention the fact why there was no Cold War after the World War I, because the situation was similar. In the final part of my essay I would like to present the key arguments and action that occurred and led directly to the outburst of the Cold War itself.
Contradictions between USSR and the US (Allies) during the World War II
When the WWII was at its beginning the USSR relations with the US were not exactly good, this was attribute mainly by the fact that USSR signed the non-aggression pact with Germany called Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which apart from the friendly foreign policy also included an economic agreement, which committed the Soviet Union to provide raw materials, oil, gas and food products to Germany in exchange...
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...e twentieth century and beyond. 2nd ed.
London: Routledge, 2008. 216-242.
Friedman, Norman. The fifty-year War: conflict and strategy in the Cold War. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2000.
Howard, Michael, and William Roger Louis. "Part III. The Cold War." The Oxford history of the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 151-202. Print.
LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1966. New York: Wiley, 1967.
Saull, Richard. "Constructing a Post–War Order: The Rise of US Hegemony and the Origins of the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 327 pp.." Cold War History 13, no. 4 (2013): 566-567. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2013.849022 (accessed May 3, 2014).
Veselý, Zdeněk. "Poválečné období a studená válka." In Dějiny mezinárodních vztahů. 2nd edition ed. Plzen: Vydavatelství a nakladatelství Aleš Čeněk, 2007. 334-438.
The United States and The Soviet Union were originally joined together by the want to defeat The Nazi army, in 1941-1945. The alliance remained, and strengthened, among the two until the end of World War II. At the end of World War II, a rupture between the two occurred. The differences began earlier, but there was a straw that broke the camels back. The reason The United States and The Soviet Union’s alliance did not work out is because The Soviet Union and The United States were complete opposites, The Soviet Union proved to be faulty, and they were never truly allies.
The alliance formed between the US and USSR during the second world war was not strong enough to overcome the decades of uneasiness which existed between the two ideologically polar opposite countries. With their German enemy defeated, the two emerging nuclear superpowers no longer had any common ground on which to base a political, economical, or any other type of relationship. Tensions ran high as the USSR sought to expand Soviet influence throughout Europe while the US and other Western European nations made their opposition to such actions well known. The Eastern countries already under Soviet rule yearned for their independence, while the Western countries were willing to go to great lengths to limit Soviet expansion. "Containment of 'world revolution' became the watchword of American foreign policy throughout the 1950s a...
The Cold War was the most important historic event in the 20th century after the Second World War, from 1945 till 1991 between two most powerful countries in that period – Soviet Union and USA. The Cold War invested a lot in world politics. What is the Cold War? This was a war for dominance in the world. In 1945 the USA was the only one country in the world that had the nuclear weapons. But in the 1949 USSR started to learn their nuclear weapons. In further developments forced the USSR was soon created by nuclear, and then thermonuclear weapons. (Isaacs J, 2008) Fight has become very dangerous for all.
Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War: Dividing the World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. Publishing.
Discussions of the causes of the Cold War are often divisive, creating disparate ideological camps that focus the blame in different directions depending on the academic’s political disposition. One popular argument places the blame largely on the American people, whose emphasis on “strength over compromise” and their deployment of the atomic bomb in the Second World War’s Pacific theatre apparently functioned as two key catalysts to the conflict between US and Soviet powers. This revisionist approach minimizes Stalin’s forceful approach and history of violent leadership throughout World War 2, and focuses instead on President Harry Truman’s apparent insensitivity to “reasonable Soviet security anxieties” in his quest to impose “American interests on the world.” Revisionist historians depict President Truman as a “Cold War monger,” whose unjustified political use of the atomic bomb and ornery diplomatic style forced Russia into the Cold War to oppose the spread of a looming capitalist democratic monopoly. In reality, Truman’s responsibility for the Cold War and the atomic bomb drop should be minimized.
Gaddis, John Lewis. “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.” Taking Sides: Clashing Views On Controversial Issues in United States History. Ed. Larry Madaras and James M. SoRelle. 14th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 302-308.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gregory, Ross. A. Cold War America: 1946 to 1990. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2003. McQuaid, Kim.
There have been many attempts to explain the origins of the Cold War that developed between the capitalist West and the communist East after the Second World War. Indeed, there is great disagreement in explaining the source for the Cold War; some explanations draw on events pre-1945; some draw only on issues of ideology; others look to economics; security concerns dominate some arguments; personalities are seen as the root cause for some historians. So wide is the range of the historiography of the origins of the Cold War that is has been said "the Cold War has also spawned a war among historians, a controversy over how the Cold War got started, whether or not it was inevitable, and (above all) who bears the main responsibility for starting it" (Hammond 4). There are three main schools of thought in the historiography: the traditional view, known alternatively as the orthodox or liberal view, which finds fault lying mostly with the Russians and deems security concerns to be the root cause of the Cold War; the revisionist view, which argues that it is, in fact, the United States and the West to blame for the Cold War and not the Russians, and cites economic open-door interests for spawning the Cold War; finally, the post-revisionist view which finds fault with both sides in the conflict and points to issues raised both by the traditionalists as well as the revisionists for combining to cause the Cold War. While strong arguments are made by historians writing from the traditionalist school, as well as those writing from the revisionist school, I claim that the viewpoint of the post-revisionists is the most accurate in describing the origins of the Cold War.
With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, and The Cold War: A New History. Dr. Gaddis received his PhD from the University of Texas in 1968; he currently is on a leave of absence, but he is a professor at Yale . At the University, his focus is Cold War history. Gaddis is one of the few men who have actually done a complete biography of George Kennan, and Gaddis even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.
Glynn, Patrick. Closing Pandora's Box "Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War". New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, Inc. 1992.
Outline of Essay About the Origins of the Cold War OUTLINE: Introduction- 1. Definition of ‘Cold War’ and the Powers involved 2. Perceived definition of ‘start of Cold War’ 3. Iron Curtain Speech, Truman Doctrine and Berlin Blockade as significant events that caused strife between both powers, but which triggering off the start of the Cold War Body- 1. Iron Curtain Speech (1946) - A warning of Soviet influence beyond the acknowledged Eastern Europe - Churchill’s belief that the idea of a balance in power does not appeal to the Soviets - Wants Western democracies to stand together in prevention of further
(1993), The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume Four, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945 – 1991, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press · Froman, M.B. (1991) The Development of the Détente, Coming to Terms, London, Macmillan Academic and Professional LTD · Kent, J. and Young, J.W. (2004) International Relations Since 1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press · www.oed.com (Oxford English Dictionary online)
Tomkinson, John L. (2008) The Cold War: Themes in Twentieth Century World History for the International Baccalaureate. 3rd edition. Athens: Anagnosis.
...E. The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
The New Cold War. Great Britain: Bloomsbury Publishing. Weber, Smith, Allan, Collins, Morgan and Entshami. 2002. Foreign Policy in a Transformed World. United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited.