Conflict Between US And USSR History Essay

In the stressful conflict that accrued between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Was after the Second World War with Hitler. The United States and the Soviet Union In 1945 became the two leading super powers in Europe, with the USSR predominately occupying the countries of Eastern Europe. The United States was the peace keeper of the countries of Western Europe. These two ‘superpowers’, in Germany along with France and Britain, agreed on occupied areas of land which made up a framework for four-power control over Europe’s land mass. In the February meetings at Yalta, in July/August at Potsdam in 1945 the two superpowers and Britain negotiated to divide the states for a land territory settlement of Europe. When the Potsdam conference became serious many differences were fought over about the future evolving status of Germany and the rest of the states of Europe. Each meeting the super powers discussed the Far East They paid very close attention to the admittance of the USSR into the war against Japan.

By 1947 an east-west division of states was manifesting its head with the Soviets seriously intending on undermining democracy and establishing puppet communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In Germany the Soviets were bent on crippling their economy and creating an overwhelming influence in their territory that they wanted to occupy. The Soviets defended their desires of Europe in terms of creating anti-Fascist governments which were friendly towards the USSR and her beliefs. The USSR was portraying the United States as bent on destroying communism while the United States portrayed the USSR as determined to undermining liberal democracy in the United States as well as Europe.

The Cold War was marked by the Berlin Blockade Crisis of 1948-9. As time progressed the victory of Mao’s Red Army of the American sponsored Nationalist Government in China in 1949 and the Korean War in 1950, received pressure from the Soviet military occupation of Hungary in 1956.

From Berlin on to 1958 leading up to the Wall crisis of 1961 in Berlin, Germany and the Missile Crisis in Cuba in 1962. During this time the Americans pulled their resources together and their new role as leader of the West was offering assistance to the economies of the Western European states they occupied through the implemented Marshall Plan of 1947. Recently allied to an emerging alliance of Western European states America signed the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949; taking the lead in controlling the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones that were occupied in 1949. In the early 1950s America worked for rearming of these new states and its full membership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the year 1955. The USSR proclaimed its territories in Germany as the German Democratic Republic completely created a formal alliance with its Eastern European new friends in 1955 which created the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization.

The Americans concluded an alliance in Asia making a peace treaty with Japan in 1951 and 1952 and included other states such as Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines, within a series of alliances, while the USSR finished an alliance with China in 1950. but the Americans gradually became entangled in a more complex war in Vietnam while the war in Korea ended in 1953 in which it supported the South Vietnam against North Vietnam which the north was backed by the USSR and China. Throughout this era the two countries made policies of rearming of nuclear weapons with continued developed of long-range weapons where they could destroy each other from their own countries.

The Cuban Missile Crisis relations got much better after the agreements were finished in stabilizing the situations in Europe. The Quadripartite Agreement from Berlin in 1971 led to the two German states entering the United Nations in 1973. The Helsinki Accords agreed the Co-operation in Europe in 1975 which appeared to mark a tacit peace treaty to end the Cold War and World War II by the Conference on Security. Agreements that limited the nuclear arms race were also finished. The conflict between the superpowers kept on going even through this era of this easing, as of tension between competitors. Even in new areas of rivalry such as was in Africa crossed its Continent while the betterment of relations continued between China and, the United States with the added work of President Nixon, the Secretary of State Kissinger, and Premier Chou En-Lai. Together they eased the tensions between the United States and the USSR worsening the relations between her and China. This gave a new shape to negotiations towards peace between the two superpowers in the 1970s.

By the mid-1970s the Cold War in its original form can be said to have died away. The arms race between East and West had all the characteristics of a classic ‘action-reaction’ model of international conflict in which each side reacts to an earlier step by the other side. The explanation of the origins of the conflict is more complex, though three broad categories of explanation can be identified. First, some analysts have emphasized that the Cold War occurred primarily as a result of the destruction of German power, the resulting ‘power vacuum’ in Central Europe and the new bipolar balance of power between the superpowers. From this perspective, the Cold War was a traditional great power conflict in which ideological rivalry was essentially secondary and the structural constraints of bipolarity crucial in throwing the two sides apart. A second explanation, sometimes called the orthodox or liberal interpretation, stresses the American desire for a return to a much more limited international role after the Second World War. However, after having begun to disarm and disengage from Europe, the Americans were obliged by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe to take up in 1947 a much more active, and unsought for, role in Europe in order to contain Soviet power. A third explanation stresses the long-term objective of the American capitalist power to undermine communism and to expand American power throughout the Middle East, the Far East, and all of Europe. Some writers in this category thus trace the Cold War back to American opposition to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Of course, many accounts weave together two or even all three of these broad categories.

In the 1980s there was a short-lived but intensive reawakening of the Cold War, sometimes called the New Cold War. Détente petered out in the late 1970s, arms control faltered, and in December 1979 the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan. From the year 1980 onward the USSR exerted intense pressure over the government of Poland. In the United States Reagan denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms and in Britain Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms which was unheard of since the worst days of the Cold War. On the Western side there was rearmament in Europe, under the so-called double-track policy of NATO, changes in the American doctrine of deterrence which appeared to emphasize the political utility of limited nuclear war, and the American pursuit of defenses against Soviet missiles in the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the post-year 1945 era it was difficult to disentangle action and reaction between the two sides. In any case, by 1987 the two superpowers had moved decisively back towards a better agreement on treaties by 1989 while Soviet power itself had crumbled. The US and Russian agreements needed to work together against terrorism after September 11, 2001 which marked the most dramatic change in their relations since the start of the Cold War in 1948.

“The imploded views of the socialists in Europe in 1989 started this new European order. Germany was brought back together, healing the pain and suffering along Europe’s heart and soul. This time in history that has been described as “the Cold War,” needed to be ended. Soviet spokesperson Gennadi Gerasimov stated, this era of conflict had last from “Yalta to Malta,” a reference to the time between the famous 1945 summit and a brief conference with the U.S. President George Bush including Gorbachev off the coast of the neutral island of Malta in December 1989. Latter at a summit, Gorbachev announced the end of an era and the start of a new one, a lasting and peaceful one, promising that he would ‘never start a hot war’ against the United States. Bush said, that he looked forward to ‘enduring cooperation.’ The real end to the period would come two years later, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist.” (Freedman, L. 2010)