Causes of the End of the Cold War - Essay Example

The Cold war can be said to have started immediately after World War 2 largely due to the competition between the two most powerful s in the world, the United States, and the Soviet Union. These two states had differing economic ideologies, with the Soviet Union having implemented communism while the United States believed in free markets and trade, hence capitalism. These differing ideologies led to a great competition between these two states, and it was not restricted just between them, but was played out on the world stage, as well. Each of these states did their best to ensure that their ideologies were implemented in as many countries as possible in the world. It is called the Cold war mainly because there was no direct confrontation between these two world powers and instead, their confrontations tended to happen by proxy. They often provided the funding and weapons to rival groups in various countries, such as Vietnam and Korea, and these fought each other to see which ideology would come up supreme (Hitchens 2006, 276). It is to the credit of the leaders of these rival states that they did not come to an open confrontation with each other. If they had allowed their emotions to get away with them, then it would have been a disaster on a global scale. This is because both of these powers possessed nuclear weapons, and in case of a war, they would have been inevitably used. Despite all the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United State, the Cold war suddenly ended in the late 1980s; this was mainly due to both long term and short-term issues, which took place in the Soviet Union, and these, are what will be discussed in this paper. The main reason why the Cold war ended is because the Soviet Union collapsed, and this happened due to various long and short-term circumstances. It has been suggested by certain scholars that the Soviet Union would have fallen much sooner than it did (Dobbs, 1993). This is because, from the time of Stalin’s rule onwards, the Soviet Union was not secure when it came to food supply. Stalin’s policy of the collectivization of agriculture, and the seizure of peasants’ property left the Soviet Union with insufficient grain reserves to feed its population. Where it had once been one of the largest exporters of grain in the world, it became one of its biggest importers. There was extremely little funding for the Soviet Union to use to export grain and there came a time when the state was virtually bankrupt. This would have manifested the fall of the Soviet system but for the lucky finding of huge oil reserves in Siberia in the early 1970s. This discovery came with a positive aspect because the prices of oil in the world market were unusually high at the time. The Soviet Union, therefore, got a temporary reprieve as this funding enabled it to continue its activities for a few more decades. The Soviet Union heavily depended on the sale of oil in the world market to fund its ongoing rivalry with the United States. When the oil prices declined in the 1980s, it spelled a disaster to the Soviet Union because it meant that it would no longer be able to compete with its rival. In the end, it had to bow out of the race because it did not have sufficient economic muscle to continue with its competition with the United States. One of the reasons why the Cold war ended is because the Soviet Union could not compete on the same economic level as the United States. The United States had a capitalist system where there was no direct state control of the economy, hence allowing for economic diversification. This was not the case in the Soviet Union because it had implemented a Communist system, which gave remarkably little allowance for innovation. Instead, the government managed almost each part of the economy. Moreover, those people who worked in the Soviet economy were given little incentive to be more productive. Everybody was given a quota to meet and once that was done, then no more was required of them. Workers were treated more like machinery than as people who were essential for the development of the economy. There were certain instances where people did not even bother to work because they had no incentive to do so. They were given any opportunity to be innovative in their work places, and even though they worked extraordinarily hard, under extreme conditions, they were given remarkably little pay. The soviet economy was not diversified enough to ensure that it stayed competitive on the global scene. It has that, by the 1980s, almost seventy percent of the Soviet industrial output was being sent to the military, and this says a lot about the lack of diversification (Rupprecht 2011, 505). This ensured that the Soviet Union could not match the economic power of the United States, and this eventually forced it to end the Cold war. There was an overstretching of those resources, which were available to the Soviet Union when competing with the United States. As stated above, the Soviet economy was diversified enough to cater for a long-term competition with the United States. When the United States made a move, which required a lot of money, the Soviet Union had to work many times harder in order to achieve the same level. Where the United States could effortlessly provide funding for its military projects, the Soviet Union often struggled and this often left its economy in a weaker state than it already was. The scenario which eventually made the Soviet Union to withdraw from the Cold war, and, therefore, effectively end it, was the action taken by the Reagan administration to increase the military spending of the United States. Moreover, this administration also declared a plan for the implementation of a Star Wars missile defense system (Risse 2011, 591). This was a move that the Soviet Union had not anticipated and found particularly hard to match, and the principal planners and decision makers in the Soviet Union realized that it would be economically impossible. This state could not increase its military budget, because to do so would mean even more reduction to the meager budgets of the other sectors of the economy. It was with this in mind that the Soviet authorities at the time chose to call off the arms race. This effectively showed the way to the conclusion of the Cold war, leaving the United States as the biggest world military power. Furthermore, the conclusion of the arms race erased the rationalization for the maintenance of the Soviet state. This state had only been maintained for so long because of the idea that the various republics within it faced a serious external threat from the West. With the end of the arms race, the communist political system fell apart, and with it went the once dominant communist party. One of the most significant immediate factors, that caused the end of the Cold war, was the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, compared to his predecessors, was young and intensely reform minded. He believed that the Soviet Union could not survive in the modern world if it continued to isolate itself economically. Furthermore, he felt that the communist system, as practiced in the Soviet Union, had deviated from the true path of Marxism. Instead of giving power to the people and making their lives better, it had denied the people their basic freedoms and had resulted in the stagnation of the economy. Gorbachev, therefore, set out to reform the Soviet system so that it could become a true manifestation of the communist ideals. He encouraged openness in the Soviet society in matters of national importance and set a path, which would eventually lead to democracy. He put a process in place that would release the state’s grip on the economy and instead allow some elements of capitalism within it; moreover, one of the biggest steps that Gorbachev took was in the foreign strategy of the Soviet Union. During his term, relations between the Soviet Union and the West improved significantly, and this brought a new sense of cooperation between them (Craig 2012, p.383). These new relations between the former rivals automatically meant that the Cold war had been brought to a conclusion. Gorbachev’s policies also has a large impact on the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, because they led the way for the ending of communist power within them. Gorbachev’s stand was that each of these states was to determine their own future, and that the Soviet Union would not interfere if they chose to remove the communist parties from power. Previously this had been the official Soviet policy, as seen when there was civil unrest in Hungary in 1956 and in Poland in 1968. In both of the latter cases, the Soviet Union had intervened militarily to protect the communist system within these countries (Mastny 1999, 189). These new policies put in place by Gorbachev eventually gave the people in these satellite states to have revolutions that swept the communist party out of power. The immediate trigger to these revolutions, however, was the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had been a symbol of the division between East and West for a long time. Revolutions also occurred within the Soviet republics one by one; they declared their independence from the Soviet government in Moscow; this spelled the closing stages of the Soviet Union and with it came conclusiveness of the Cold war. In conclusion, it can be said that the end of the Cold war was caused by factors, which had been in the making on both the long and short terms. The triggers for this end mostly came from the Soviet Union, which was the economically inferior of the two states. Moreover, the coming to power of Gorbachev helped a lot to speed up the end through his policies of partnership with the West. References Craig, C. 2012, "The end of the cold war and soviet collapse - the limits of realism and liberalism: A reply to Wohlforth, Deudney and Ikenberry", International Politics, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 383-387. Dobbs, M. 1993, Siberian Oil: A Dream in Ruins; The Soviet Union Wrecked an Industry; Russia Seeks to Save It, Washington, D.C., United States, Washington, D.C. Hitchens, R. 2006, "Wars of the Cold War: Campaigns and Conflicts, 1945-1990", The Journal of Military History, vol. 70, no. 1, pp. 276-278. Mastny, V. 1999, "The Soviet non-invasion of Poland in 1980-1981 and the end of the Cold War", Europe - Asia Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 189-211. Risse, T. 2011, "Ideas, discourse, power and the end of the cold war: 20 years on", International Politics, vol. 48, no. 4-5, pp. 591-606. Rupprecht, T. 2011, "Socialist high modernity and global stagnation: a shared history of Brazil and the Soviet Union during the Cold War", Journal of Global History, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 505-528. Read More