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The Key Political Cause Of The Cold War

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A key political cause of the establishment of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was the Cold War. The Cold War was a period of political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, starting in 1945 after the end of WWII and lasting until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. At its basis, the war was a ‘conflict between the ideologies of communism and capitalism’. The USA is known for being one of the staunchest followers of capitalism, meaning that business and property are privately owned. Capitalism focuses heavily on freedom and personal rights and ties into the idea of the ‘American Dream’, the concept that any citizen can achieve success if they work hard enough. However, although ‘the essential feature of capitalism …show more content…

The state owns all property and equality was a key feature, so extreme poverty was much rarer than in the USA, but the general standard of living was lower in the Soviet Union than in the USA. To the USA, the very existence of Communism threatened the capitalist ideals that they held so dear, mainly that of freedom from control. Public American distrust of Communism went back far earlier than the start of the Cold War. Before WWII, opinion polls showed that ‘US citizens trusted Communists less than they trusted the Nazis’. Similarly, the USSR was ‘bitterly opposed to capitalism’. This mutual distrust and disdain led to the Cold War. The Cold War got its name because the USSR and the USA never actually engaged in a war with each other, instead fighting indirectly through the spread of propaganda, espionage, and ‘proxy wars’, wherein a conflict was fought by two sides, with the USA and the Soviet Union respectively backing each side through political, financial, and military support. Among these proxy wars were the Korean War and the Vietnam War; the Soviet Union was attempting to spread communism to other countries, and the USA was trying to combat this. Despite the many facets of the Cold War, there is one defining factor: the nuclear arms

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