Question

cold war introduction​

Answer 1

Answer:

Cold War Introduction

Explanation:

The uneasy alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany began to unravel after World War II, giving rise to an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that became known as the Cold War, a name coined separately by English writer George Orwell and American presidential adviser Bernard Baruch. The United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the World War II as the planet’s only superpowers, and, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while the U.S. was employing the Marshall Plan to help resurrect the economies and democracies of western Europe, the U.S.S.R. was establishing communist regimes in eastern Europe and keeping them on a tight leash. By the mid-1950s the two camps had formed competing military alliances, the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. With the triumph of the communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Soviet bloc had gained another formidable ally in the People’s Republic of China.

Answer 2

Introduction



The Cold War was a lengthy struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in the aftermath of the surrender of Hitler’s Germany. In 1941, Nazi aggression against the USSR turned the Soviet regime into an ally of the Western democracies. But in the post-war world, increasingly divergent viewpoints created rifts between those who had once been allies.



The United States and the USSR gradually built up their own zones of influence, dividing the world into two opposing camps. The Cold War was therefore not exclusively a struggle between the US and the USSR but a global conflict that affected many countries, particularly the continent of Europe. Indeed, Europe, divided into two blocs, became one of the main theatres of the war. In Western Europe, the European integration process began with the support of the United States, while the countries of Eastern Europe became satellites of the USSR.



From 1947 onwards, the two adversaries, employing all the resources at their disposal for intimidation and subversion, clashed in a lengthy strategic and ideological conflict punctuated by crises of varying intensity. Although the two Great Powers never fought directly, they pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war on several occasions. Nuclear deterrence was the only effective means of preventing a military confrontation. Ironically, this ‘balance of terror’ nevertheless served as a stimulus for the arms race. Periods of tension alternated between moments of détente or improved relations between the two camps. Political expert Raymond Aron perfectly defined the Cold War system with a phrase that hits the nail on the head: ‘impossible peace, improbable war’.



The Cold War finally came to an end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.