Term Paper on "Cold War Geopolitics During the Decades"

Term Paper 3 pages (1023 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Cold War Geopolitics

During the decades that the Cold War encompassed, anti-Communist world politicians were viewed as belligerent and bellicose and yet, the strength that was so vocally decried by various Soviet sympathizers around the world, eventually led to the destruction of one of the most tyrannical governments in recorded history. American nuclear power incensed Soviet leaders and left leaning politicians around the world but for differing reasons. Soviet leaders understood that the great power the United States was amassing would be difficult if not impossible to overcome but, sympathizers for the communist way of thinking viewed American nuclear power as the ultimate threat to world peace.

Soon after World War II, the lines of demarcation were drawn up and the world was sliced up and distributed to either Soviet or American powers. As the cold war progressed, the threat of mutually assured destruction made war impractical but never removed the danger. Both Soviet and U.S. scientists worked frenetically with giant defense budgets at the ready. For the U.S., great debt resulted from the expenditures but for the Soviet Union, economic collapse loomed nearer with each new weapon system. Eventually the Soviet empire fell as a result of both internal and external pressures growing out of economic despair, political repression and the hope for something better. To understand the global political implications of the cold war it is helpful to briefly examine some of the specific time periods and individuals that directly impacted world wide politics.

Cold War Periods

The Cold War can be divided into different time periods marked by various initiatives, approaches to the problem and major political figures. These time provide a sense for how the cold war was "heating up" and help to illustrate the nature of global politics.

One period that illustrates a specific movement in geopolitics begins after the 1945 Conference at Yalta where the Soviets and the Americans drew up specific agreements that were designed to direct international affairs. It matters little what the accords were because Stalin immediately began violating the agreement. Roosevelt was alarmed by Stalin's Soviet expansion into Eastern bloc countries but was incapable of doing anything about it. One by one, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Albania and Czechoslovakia fell to Soviet domination often without an official shot ever being fired. In response, the Western bloc formed NATO in 1949 with founding members Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States.

The wise men of the Cold War embraced collective security, forged NATO, created a host of other multilateral institutions, and grasped the interdependence of the modern global economy. (Leffler 22)

Soviet communist expansionism had an inevitable quality to it that claimed that it would permeate the entire world. Great angst gripped the Western world as it faced the Communist workers revolution. What made the force especially irresistible was that a stockpile of nuclear arms were being developed that would help assure that the world would eventually embrace Communist ideals.

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