The cold war

             United States and Russian Relations have always been up and down. For fifty years the United States was locked in a cold war struggle with Communist nation of the Soviet Union. The American people feared Communism. The U.S. government responded by spending trillions of dollars on weapons specifically for fighting a war with the Soviet Union, but of course this never happened. There where many times that tensions rose and the two nations hit the brink of war, but political solutions where always chosen over war. The U.S. was put into trillions of dollars worth of debt due to Cold War arms race build up. The Soviet Union crumbled in the early 90's into the Russia of today. The eastern European nations it controlled took their independence, and Russia converted to a democratic, capitalist nation.
             In the 1980's Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist party. One of his first acts was to develop friendly negotiations with Washington to end the tensions. He started Glasnost and Perestraika, which means openness and reconstruction. Ronald Reagan, US President from 1981-1989, had an intense distrust of the Soviet Union. He increased military spending to build up and train all branches of the military. In 1988 smaller satellite nations broke away from the Soviet Union and became democracies. The United States funded them to help them get their democracies started, because it would be less of a threat to the United States if they were split up. The Soviet Union made itself bankrupt after the many years of trying to out-spend the US on military development. Unlike the Soviet Union the US had the economy to handle such spending.
             In 1992 the United States saw the great end to the cold war when the mayor of Moscow Boris Yeltsin was elected president of free democratic Russia. This was because he stood with the anticommunist protestors in Moscow as the military tanks rolled in, and was seen as a hero. He took...

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The cold war. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 11:09, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/35521.html