To what extend can it be said that the 'West' won the Cold War Essay

To what extend can it be said that the 'West' won the Cold War - Essay Example Other affiliates of these regimes and several scholars have made identical claims, which are turning out to be, as emphasised by Ralph Summy & Michael Salla (1995) in their prelude, an ‘emergent orthodoxy’ (ibid, p. xv). The objective of this essay is to analyse the extent of the victory of the United State in the Cold War in the light of the logical essence of such claims. There are great difficulties contained in the modus operandi ‘winning the Cold War’ (Cohen 1995). The foremost is uncertainty about the extent of the claim, as the mentions of Reagan and Bush suggest, since victory in 1989 implied something distinct from victory in 1992, when the USSR had disintegrated and Gorbachev had been dethroned (Philips 2001). The next and interrelated difficulty is ambiguity about the real description of the Cold War. ‘Winning the Cold War’ is a very debatable principle since it can be understood as a moral excuse for all the defence and foreign polic ies of the Reagan administration—for instance, military involvement in Nicaragua during Reagan’s term, a tactic which foresaw perhaps combating and winning a major war and unparalleled budgets for peacetime military (Painter 1999). The concept of ‘winning’ also seems to justify the rules of aiming for military supremacy and arbitrations from strength, which may be catastrophic as shown. Did the United States Really Win the Cold War? Before attempting to evaluate the influence of the Reagan regime, it has to be explained first what was involved in the end of the Cold War, by determining the major components in the strategy of Gorbachev after 1985 and the unforeseen results of the course of internal and external reform. The policy reforms of Gorbachev occurred in four major domains; in each instance the policy acquired impetus and became more revolutionary commencing around 1987 (Geoffrey 2008). Primarily, the Soviet administration commenced after 1985 to re form features of its military strategy viewed as particularly hostile by the West, and at the same time to alter its method of arms control (Suri 2002). Gorbachev embarked on reassessing military principle, pioneering the notion of ‘reasonable sufficiency at the nuclear level’ (Juviler & Kimura 2009, 139) which indicates that ‘lower nuclear weapons levels would be required’ (ibid, 139) and advancing toward ‘defensive defence at the conventional level’ (Juviler & Kimura 2009, 140), in an effort to suppress the apprehensions of the West about surprise assault. The large-scale change in arms control strategy was recommended by the spectacular suggestions formed at the Reykavik summit convention in 1986 and agreed upon during the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) arbitrations, when the Soviet party suggested an extraordinary eagerness to agree on thorough on-site inspection and bigger reductions in its arsenal than those mandated of the United States (Lefler & Westad 2010). The address of Gorbachev at the 1988 United Nations, when he assured considerable unilateral cuts in Soviet arsenals and combatants in European Russia and East Germany, expressed the gravity of his determination to reduce armed forces (Juviler & Kimura 2009). Subsequently, Gorbachev indicated a reform in the ideological scope and proclaimed objectives of Soviet foreign policy, distancing from an idea of global class conflict toward a more broad-minded idea of peace and alliance. Propaganda about peace had contributed in Soviet policy beforehand,