The Cold War: The Struggle for Control of Europe - Case Study Example

• The Cold War

Anti-communism has been a persistent issue in American political life for more than a century. However, since the supposed danger from international Communism moves away by the beginning of the 1990s, we run the risk of identifying the nation’s struggle against Communism as a remote historical event, one that influenced only the diplomatic and military policies of the Cold War. Quite the opposite, that struggle profoundly frightened the nation’s social order too. Watchfulness against Communism was national precedence through the darkest days of the Cold War, from the late 1940s until the mid-1950s. Overseas, the government organized alliances and enormous military assets to combat Soviet expansionism, both real and imaginary.

The best thing one can say regarding U.S. participation in the Cold War is that one can simply visualize how it might have turned out even worse, without a doubt, disastrously worse. Its disappearance has allowed people all over the world to respire comfortably, even if its legacies, together with mammoth stocks of nuclear weapons and materials, potential loose nukes, and disaster waiting to happen to continue to pose a grave threat to humanity.

• • The Rise of the Superpowers

Regardless of their huge geological size, large populations, and natural resources, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic assumed a tangential role in international affairs in the period between the two world wars, from 1919 to 1939. American diplomats customarily accentuate the separation of the ‘New World’ of the Americas from the ‘Old World’ of Europe and practice a policy of circumventing political and military entanglements towards that continent which was generally described as ‘isolationism’.