U.S. And The Soviet Union example essay topic

This got a 40/40 in my AP World History class last year, my teacher was the hardest teacher and would practically look for ways to mark you down. The only notes she wrote were "Where exactly" about closing of trade routes, but I'm not sure, it's been so long. Enjoy! After World War two, there was an emergence of two superpowers that had once been allies, but ended up enemies due to very different ideology. This clash of concepts between the Soviet Union and the United States led to a period of conflict and tension between capitalism and communism.

This competition for superiority posed a serious threat to the entire world: nuclear warfare. The ideological clash between communism and capitalism that began in 1917 was one of the very early events leading up to the Cold War, although the United States and Imperial Russia had been enemies since 1900. There was never a direct military engagement but there was a half-century of military build-up. The world's largest colonial empire and the world's leading economic power were marked by mutual distrust and ideological tension. Because Russia was unable to compete industrially with the United States, they wanted to close off part of east Asia to trade, but the United States demanded open trade. After winning the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world wide challenge to capitalism.

During the war the soviets believed that the British and the Americans had intentionally delayed a second front against Germany, although they had been in no position to carry out Stalin's request to invade northern France. The Soviets suspected that they had decided to let Russians bear the worst of the war, but would intervene towards the end to influence peace settlements and dominate Europe as well. These misconceptions left unfounded feelings of tension and hostility between the two superpowers. Both the USSR and the United States had very different ideas of how to establish postwar security. Americans assumed that if U.S. style governments and markets were established, states could resolve their differences peacefully. The key to the U.S. vision of security would require a rebuilt capitalist Europe and U.S. economic and political leadership of the postwar world.

Soviet leaders understood security in terms of space. Stalin was determined to use the red army to control Poland, dominate the Balkans, and destroy Germany's capacity for another war, but this strategy risked confrontation with the U.S. In Europe, food shortages and shortages of other necessary consumer goods were very common. President Truman's advisors thought that the Soviet Union wanted to weaken the position of the United States in a period of postwar confusion. In 1947 the British government announced that it couldn't finance Greece in it's civil war again ts communist-led insurgents, which drove Truman to announce his policy of containment, and rallied Americans to spend 400 million dollars to intervene in the Greek Civil War with his famous Truman Doctrine speech.

European economies failed to recover from wartime destruction, and communist parties were winning large votes in free elections. This caused American policy makers to worry that economy in western Europe would allow communist parties to seize power. The Truman Doctrine was then complemented by the Marshall Plan, a pledge of assistance aimed at countering threats to Europe's balance of power. In retaliation to western moves to reunite Germany, Joseph Stalin built blockades to block access to west Berlin, and the soviets blocked off all waterways and railroads. Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by flying over the blockade in B-2 Bombers, which no one would risk shooting down.

Faced with the Chinese Revolution the Truman administration quickly escalated their containment policy. After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a slight relaxation of tensions, but the Cold War remained an uneasy armed truce. In 1961, the east Germans built the Berlin Wall to prevent the movement of east Berlin people into West Berlin. The Cold War took so long that everyone from Nixon, Eisenhower, Truman, and Kennedy, who gave the okay to invade Cuba, was involved in the U.S. Also, everyone from Stalin, Krush cev, Fidel Castro, Gorbachev, and Rhee were involved in the USSR, Korea, And Cuba. It is a very lucky thing that tensions ended before a nuclear war. Between the U.S. and the Soviet Union they could " ve wiped out the entire world, and none of us would be alive.

Although communism still exists in the world, it is no longer such a large threat to capitalism.