Cold War (1945–91)

Capitalism and communism are radically different ideologies, diametrically opposite in essentially every conceivable way. As this clash formed the basis of the Cold War rivalry between the United...

When you consider the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, it becomes obvious why the two powers could not get along after World War II. The two superpowers were...

President Reagan can be credited with helping to end the Cold War in two somewhat different ways. First, we can say Reagan's aggressive arms buildup helped to end the conflict. Reagan engaged the...

Communism appealed to these Third World countries for two related reasons. First, it appealed to them because they were poor countries who could reasonably blame their troubles on capitalism....

I would say one of the critical contributors to the Cold War was the ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Ultimately, it pit Free Enterprise and Western Democracy...

Stalin's chief security concern in the immediate postwar era was to secure the western border of the Soviet Union. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Russian people had been involved...

As mentioned, the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction was enough to forestall the possibility of outright war; although one side or the other would have prevailed, depending on who fired their...

I think that there were some significant elements behind China becoming Communist at the height of the Cold War. The first was that the emergence of Sino- Soviet relationships on both diplomatic...

There were similarities and differences between the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Both of these plans were designed to help countries that were fighting the spread of communism. While the...

There were two major contributing factors to the diverging positions of the United States and Soviet Union after World War II.The first was the war itself. With the exception of one fairly minor...

Churchill was the first major political figure to proclaim publicly the dissolution of the Grand Alliance that had defeated Hitler in the Second World War. He wanted his audience, both in Fulton...

What you are referring to here is respectfully known as "The Battle of Dien Bein Phu" or even "The Seige of Dien Bien Phu" by historians. The French Union was fighting the Viet Minh and the battle...

This issue is often described as "nuclear proliferation." Nuclear weapons carry the capability of mass destruction and very long term damage to the environment and collateral damage to any one...

In many respects, a policy of containment in some shape or form was simply unavoidable. As the United States and the Soviet Union were both nuclear powers, a direct military confrontation between...

The most obvious lingering effects of the Cold War can be seen in the tense relations between the United States and many countries that are or were communist. During the Cold War, the US was in...

This was different because it had the US intervene in areas where it had no direct national interest. In general, the US had tried not to get involved in the affairs of other countries unless there...

In this speech, President Truman was announcing the so-called Truman Doctrine. This doctrine stated, in essence, that the United States would support any nation that was in danger of being taken...

Historians do not like to say that anything is inevitable. They prefer to emphasize contingency and human agency in historical developments. In the case of the Cold War, however, it is certainly...

Japan is considered an American victory in the Cold War because the United States helped to rebuild the Japanese economy along capitalist lines after World War II. The United States was afraid of...

This is a very broad topic, and hopefully your study will be more guided than the list of questions I will provide. Here are some questions that I have used on previous tests: 1.) Who deserves the...

The main point of President Reagan's address was to bring forth his belief about the Cold War and how his approach would be fundamentally different than that of his predecessors. Regan's speech...

There are two major points of view on this issue. The first holds that President Reagan was the primary mover behind the end of the Cold War. In this view, Reagan ended the Cold War by pushing...

On the one hand, the Cold War had never been confined to Europe. The early years of the conflict saw struggles in Korea, Iran, and in Taiwan. But it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the Cold War...

Your discussion of this question should begin with World War II and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. When this happened, the USSR became one of the Allies. Because the USSR was one of the...

Germany played a major role in the Cold War. It served as a place where the East and West came into contact with one another and it served to intensify some of the Cold War conflicts. The split of...

The leaders of the Soviet Union were committed under the principles of Marx and Lenin to spread Communism throughout the world. They had by far the most powerful land army in Europe and Asia after...

Blacklisting was not really a problem for the Hollywood entertainment industry as a whole. Instead, it was a problem for individual people in the business and for civil liberties in the US. The...

Different people have different views on this subject. Some say that Gorbachev was the most important player in ending the Cold War. His programs of glasnost and perestroika changed the Soviet...

I think that a fairly serious argument can be made that it was political leadership that played a very dominant role in the origins of the cold War. Emerging from the Potsdam Conference, there was...

The Truman Doctrine said that the United States would give aid to any country threatened by the spread of communism. There are at least three other things that Truman could have done. First, he...

There are a number of ways in which this was the case. Let us look at two of the most important. First, this conflict involved a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. The USSR was the main...

There is no simple response for this question. Most historians believe that the Cold War ended as a result of a series of Democtatic and Republican presidents who all stuck to the same basic...

In my mind, I think that one of the key features of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the use of diplomacy and insight into an adversary in order to avoid conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the...

The Soviet Union and the US got involved in the Cold War because they had different economic and political systems. Their systems were completely opposed to one another. Each system taught that...

The Cold War was the period between 1945 and 1991 in the aftermath of World War II, when the rise of Nazism had been stopped, only to be "replaced" by the rise of Communism as exemplified by the...

As both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed extensive nuclear capabilities, their respective geopolitical goals needed to be achieved without direct confrontation. Thus it became...

If you are simply asking when the Soviet Union came to have a nuclear weapon, the answer is 1949. The Soviets exploded their first nuclear weapon in August of that year. However, one can argue...

Early on, these attempts were not successful at all. As time went by, the attempts became more successful. For example, President Eisenhower was not very successful at all in either his "atoms for...

The Marshall Plan was relevant to the goal of containment because it helped to prevent communism from spreading into Western Europe after WWII. After WWII, the countries of Western Europe were...

Counterfactual history is always, by its nature, highly speculative, and many historians refuse to engage in it at all. However, such an approach to history can be valuable if it leads us to...

There were a number of important events in this period of the Cold War. The most obvious of these was the Korean War. This war helped to cement in the minds of the West the idea that he communists...

Truman does this by laying out the reasons that Greece is in need of help. He argues that: Greece is in dire need of help in order to continue to exist. It lacks resources. It was devastated by...

The US and the USSR got involved in this conflict because of their needs relating to the Cold War. During the Cold War, the two superpowers wanted to expand their power and influence as widely as...

As with the other question of yours I just answered, it seems that you are asking about general attitudes in the Cold War, not about the time period that is generally known as the time of detente...

NATO answers those conditions. Atlantic Charter was during World War II. Warsaw Pact was a response to NATO and SALT is a treaty, not a group.

Detente emerged as the guiding framework of relations between the USSR and United States in the early 1970s. It origins were varied. First, some leaders in both countries had been alarmed at how...