Essay Example on Cold War: US-USSR Power Tension After WWII

The Cold War was a geographical and power tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. It began immediately after the Second World War. During the Second World War, the two forces were united as Allied Powers against the Axis powers. However, the completion of the war with triumph over Axis Powers meant that the United States and The Soviet Union had no reason to hold them together. As a result, each country began to pursue its economic and political interests. This pursuit led to collisions due to competition and rivalry. The Soviet Union wanted to expand its communist ideology to other countries. However, the United States was against these efforts. It, therefore, utilized its economic and military prowess to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving its goals. As a result of competing interests, the Cold war was inevitable as each country tried to prove that it possessed more power than the other. Furthermore, the tensions that had occurred during the partnership of the United States and the Soviet Union as members of the Allied Powers also facilitated the occurrence of the Cold War. The Soviet Union felt that the Allied Powers, including the United States, failed to intervene during significant powers putting the Soviet Union at a disadvantage. This paper demonstrated that the cold war was inevitable ad offers reasons to support why the Cold war was bound to occur.

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The Cold War was also inevitable because of the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was a liberal democracy that upheld the principles of democracy and capitalism and individualism. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, embraced communism. The two ideologies differ significantly. Capitalism is an economic system that minimizes government intrusion and promotes individual liberty. In a capitalist government, individuals have the right to carry out financial affairs such as private ownership, competition, free trade, and apply principles of supply and demand without interference from the government. Democracy is a common characteristic of capitalist societies whereby power lies with the people. Individuals are granted the ability to make critical decisions regarding how the affairs of their country are run. The principles of capitalism and democracy differ significantly with communism. Communism is an economic system that is the direct opposite of capitalism. Instead of promoting individual rights, communism advocates for collectivisms or communal ownership of the means of production. In such a system, the emphasis is not on individual rights but the rights of the working class, such as good working conditions or employees. Furthermore, the government is actively involved in controlling economic affairs to ensure fairness by reducing unwanted monopoly. Due to this regulation, free trade does not thrive in societies that embrace communism. Additionally, communist nations are often run through dictatorship, whereby power mainly lies in the hand of the minority instead of the majority. The people are governed according to the interests of the person or group of people who hold power. These sharp contrasts of the Soviet Union's communism and the United States' liberal capitalist ideology lead to the creation of rivalry between the two powers. On the one hand, the Soviet Union was determined to spread communism to many countries as possible. The United States, on the other hand, had been opposed to the idea of communism for a long time. As a result, it was determined to contain the spread of communism. Make matters worse; there were domestic fears of communism in the United States in what was referred to as the Red Scare, especially among business leaders. Usually, capitalism, which emphasizes the principle of free trade, leads to exploitation of workers by their employers. By contrast, communism emphasis the rights of workers, such as the providence of reasonable wages and working conditions. The business leaders in the United States felt threatened by the ideology of communism, which would give more privileges to the workers and also facilitate the emergence of workers unions that would champion the rights of employees. In an effort to curb the spread of communism, the United States adopted a policy that empowered countries that were potential targets of communism by offering financial aid. For instance, Harry S. Truman declared his government's commitment to assist countries such as Greece and Turkey towards political and economic stability in safeguarding them from the communist Soviet Union in 1947. Generally, the United States and its allies, such as Britain, wanted to suppress the Soviet Union's efforts to spread communism to Europe, Asia, and Africa. This suppression angered the Soviet Union leading to animosity between the two powers (RUs). The emergence of the Cold War was therefore facilitated by the occurrence of multiple incidents that created animosity between the United States and Soviet Unions. Cold War was bound to occur as each country tried to defend its interest.

The mistrust that existed between the United States and the Soviets was bound to create tensions that eventually lead to the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Unions were both allied against Germany and its allies during the Second World War. However, the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin felt enraged because the other members of the Ally had taken a back seat leaving the Soviet Union to struggle solely against the Nazi (Causes of the cold war, n.d). Joseph Stalin who was the who was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time blamed the United States and the other members of the Allies for failing to intervene on time during the Normandy Invasion and Allied Invasion of Italy. As a result of this hesitance, Russia lost many of its people who were killed by the Nazi Army during the two incidents. The resentfulness of the Soviet Union towards the United States was further heightened by the US decision to cease the lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union towards the end of World War Two. On May 11, 1995, Harry S. Truman ordered cutbacks of lend-lease assistance that the United States was offering to the Soviet Union. Lend-lease was a form of a grant that the United States provided to its allies that included items such as oil, food, and other materials. This aid had played a significant role in sustaining the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The decision to reduced this aid was a move that and angered Joseph Stalin and also sparked protests among Russians. According to Herring, Joseph Stalin interpreted the reduction of lend-lease as the United States' way of coercing the Soviet Union to concede to its wants through economic extortion. Additionally, competition between the two countries over nuclear weapons reinforced the mistrust that had already been created. The United States had managed to develop nuclear weapons through its Manhattan Project. Upon discovery of these weapons, the Soviet Union felt challenged and went ahead to create similar arms. Once the two countries had possession of nuclear arms, the animosity and mistrust between them increased as each of them perceived the other as a threat.

The Cold War was inventible because the one reason that united the United States and the Soviet Union, winning against the Nazi Regime, was over. During the Second World War, the members of the Allied come together with the common objective of fighting against the Nazi Regime and it's sympathizing. However, it was evident that this goal had been achieved towards the end of World War Two. This accomplishment laid the ground for the commencement of the Cold War. The two leading powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, no longer had a reason to glue them together. Each of them began looking for ways to fulfill its interest that had been disregarded during the war. As a result, they perceived each other as enemies since one was standing in the way of the other political and economic interests. This divergence saw the United States try to thwart Soviet Union efforts to spread communism by supporting countries such as Turkey and Greece to rebel against the Soviet Union. There were multiple instances when the United States prevented the Soviet Union from taking over various territories, which would allow them to spread communism. For instance, the United States threatened the Soviet Union when it attempted to invade Afghanistan. In another instance, the United States stopped the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party from controlling Manchuria. Similarly, the United States thwarted efforts by communist North Korean troops to control the Korean Peninsula as well as the Soviet Union's attempted control of Trieste. All of these efforts by the United States were meant to ensure that the Soviet Union does not have the opportunity to spread its communist ideology, which is incompatible with the United States' capitalism. In addition, these efforts also ensured that the Soviet Union does not have access to vital resources that would give it an advantage over the United States. For instance, one of the major reasons why the United States stopped the Soviet Union from taking over Trieste is to prevent its access to the Adriatic Sea. The United States started withdrawing the aid that it was previously offering to the Soviet Union as a way of paralyzing it economically. This was a strategy of demonstrating that it possessed more power than the Soviet Union. The two powers ceased being partners and instead became competitors. Competition and rivalry are portrayed through the tremendous efforts that each country takes to possess more nuclear arms than the other. The rivalry due to deferring economic and political reasons lead made the Cold War inevitable as each of the two powers tried to threaten each other to attain dominance.

Conclusion

The completion of the Second World War brought new challenges that made the Cold war inevitable. After defeating the Axis powers, the Allied powers were faced with the difficult task of dividing resources and also establishing a new order in territories that were affected, especially Germany. Unfortunately, the cooperation between the two countries never went past the objective of defeating Axis powers. Each of the two powers shifted its focus to sharing resources in a way that favored its economic and political interests. As a result, the two conflicted, leading to a violation of treaties that had been made previously regarding the sharing of resources. The Soviet Union was especially threatened by the United States since the US had attained economic prowess ad also managed to create nuclear weapons. The lack of fairness and equality between the two negotiating parties led to the animosity that was settled through the Cold War. Upon completion of the Second World War, both the United States and the Soviet Union were equally powerful. Therefore, each one of them viewed the other as a potential source of threat. This led to the occurrence of the Cold War, whereby battles were not fought through combat. The Cold War utilized a threatening tactic whereby the United States would threaten the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union would retaliate by fighting back with a more significant threat. The use of threats to intimidate each other is evident in the Soviet Union's efforts to create nuclear weapons upon realizing that the United States possessed such arms. Therefore, the Cold War was a power tension that utilized intimidation tactics that were meant to give one country dominant over the other. Ideological incompatibility between the United States and the Soviet Union hampered the ability of the two countries to work together. This division caused the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Wa...