In this paper I will discuss what actions and thoughts added up to cause the cold war. The cold war lasted from September 1, 1945 to about December 25, 1991. That is about forty-five years, which is an extremely long time. The cold war was a global competition basically between two sides, the Free World, which was led by the United States of America, and the Communist World led by the Soviet Union. The struggle took place through indirect military conflict, and direct competition in the areas of economics, diplomacy, culture, space exploration, and political theory. It also involved nuclear stand offs, espionage, and global competition for other nations. The cold war has established the framework for most international and national policy decisions. The United States goals were to defend Western Europe, contain Soviet and Communist expansion, and to prevent nuclear war. The Americans had an estimated twenty-four million veterans participating in the cold war and spent over twelve trillion dollars on it as well. The results for America were that we maintained the achievements of our victory in World War II, avoided/prevented global nuclear war, and unified Germany. We also directly freed 400 million people in ten different European nations from the bondage of Communism. We did this in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The United States also indirectly assisted in the freeing or relieving of tension/control on the peoples of Albania, Yugoslavia, Finland, and Mongolia.Basically the two pick players in the cold war were the United States and the Soviet Union. At the end of the World War II the relations between these two countries had deteriorated. They became rivals and the tension built up into the creation of the cold war. Things especially heated up between the two when the Soviet Union would not accept the offer from America to give repar...
