Why did the Cold War End Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Why did the Cold War End - Essay Example 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