Cold War: how it started and ended

COLD WAR

Cold war was an ideological conflict between mainly the United States commonly known as western bloc and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or eastern bloc immediately after the Second World War in 1945. It was an ideological tension, because what caused the war was based on two ideologies that dominated the world political, economic and social spheres then.

According to Heywood (2007:133) “the term Cold war was coined by Walter Lippman in 1944.” He described it as “a state of protracted and extreme tension between countries or rival alliances that stops short of all-out war. The term is most commonly associated with a period of political, economic, cultural and military rivalry between the ‘capitalist’ western bloc and the ‘communist’ eastern bloc, and thus between the US and Soviet superpowers.”

The two ideologies are:
Capitalism ––– the United States
Communism ––– the Soviet Union

Analysis of Cold war: How did Cold War Start?
 
Cold war began immediately after the Second World War which started in 1939 and ended in 1945. After the World War II, the United States, and the Soviet Union emerged as the world strongest or super powers.  This led to the bipolarism or eye ball to eyeball diplomacy between the duos.

The Soviet Union in her bid to export socialist cum communist ideology to other Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria etc., and beyond led to the total apprehension on the western side. Whereas, the US was also promoting and exporting capitalism mostly in Third World countries which became battle ground for the two super powers. The United States saw the idea of communism as anti-capitalism and wants to stop the spread of communism by all means. This led to tension between the two countries (Microsoft Encarta, 2009).

Note: The war was called Cold War because the two countries never got into armed combat liking shootings, bombings and killings.
How did Cold War End?
  
Cold war lasted for more than 40 years. But everything that has a beginning must definitely have an end. In the 1980s a new leader came to power in the Soviet Union in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev.  He helped to ease the tension, by signing a mutual agreement with the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan for both countries to limit their chemical weapons (Microsoft Encarta, 2009).

Hence, another factor that contributed to the end of tension was the fall of Berlin wall in 1989 due to large influx of people from Eastern to western Germany. It was caused by poverty, and unemployment that hit the Soviet Union because of high rate of spending caused by the tension of the war.

The Soviet become broke, all money was geared towards procurement of military hardware and accumulation of nuclear weapons. Because of this high rate of poverty the Soviet Union lacked money to persecute the war. It has to surrender because its economy collapsed. According to Fukuyama (quote in Heywood, 2007: 134), in his “End of History Thesis’, he argues that the west, and particularly the USA, won the Cold War ultimately because only US –style liberal democracy offers a viable economic and political system.”

     Finally, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) later disintegrated into 15 countries in 1991 when President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet flag was de-hoisted and balkanized.
The 15 countries that declared their independence are:
1. Armenia
2. Azerbaijan
3. Belarus
4. Estonia
5. Georgia
6. Kazakhstan
7. Kyrgyzstan
8. Latvia
9. Lithuania
10. Moldavia
11. Russia
12. Tajikistan
13. Turkmenistan
14. Ukrain
15. Uzbekistan

(http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution).