The Main Reason to End the Cold War

As a pull up s pips of its defeat of Nazi Ger legion(predicate) in the Second World War, Soviet control was established in the wake of the advance of the florid Army over Eastern Europe. The Cold War past ensued, the phalanx confrontation between East and West, during which Soviet military power and political, economic and ideological influence became a major factor in world affairs. Some liberalization of the political science in Russia occurred in the wake of the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, especially during the early 1960s low Nikita Khrushchev, but the Soviet system was largely in place within the Soviet uniting and, to a modified extent, in the other Soviet bloc countries through the mid-80s.

In military terms, after universe forced to retreat under the threat of a atomic showdget with the United States in 1962 from its placement of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba, the U.S.S.R. had through a massive rearmament program achieved mount parity with the United States. During the 1970s, Soviet power had been projected into many areas of the world. In much of the Third World, the West appeared to be on the defensive. All attempts by Eastern European peoples, in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, had been put down by force under the Brezhnev Doctrine which, loosely translated, meant that the Soviet Union would keep what it had and take what it w

It is true that Western policies contributed to the decease of the Soviet Union. As Kennan put it in 1950, that was one of its head teacher aims: "to promote tendencies which must so fartually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power" (127,128). Spanier says that "without containment, the inefficiency of the Soviet system might not permit mattered much, and as a hegemon, the Soviet Union would not stand had to engage-let alone overreact-in a costly continuous arms emulation" (380, 381).

However, the United States posed a dilemma for the Soviet Union. by dint of the arms buildup and strategic forces modernization program of the Reagan administration, "the Soviet Union was . . .

confronted not only with a costly arms melt down when it needed huge capital investments at home, but excessively a high-tech arms race when it could not even keep up with contemporary Western technology" (Spanier 347). By 1986, the Soviet Union was spending 16-25 percent of its GNP on defense, as compared with six percent in the United States and trinity percent in Western Europe (Spanier 347). Some observers, such(prenominal) as Raymond Garthoff, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, give up portrayed the Soviet Union during this period as "haplessly seeking peace only to be rebuffed again by a confrontational Ameri throne administration" (Muravchik 42). To those on the left corresponding La Feber, the massive military buildup under the late Carter and Reagan administrations served picayune purpose other to aggravate Soviet-American relations (309). La Feber tends to belt the United States for the Cold War itself, arguing that post-war American responses to hostile Soviet actions in Eastern Europe "stiffened Russian use" and that Stalin's aims was not "world revolution," but "Russian security and his own personal power" (17, 21). This neo-Marxist interpretation of history flies in the face of the facts. Spanier's reply is that "had there been no American opposition, who can say
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