The Cold War: Cause and effect - Research Paper Example

o states held a competition for a supremacy position within the system and where they wanted to blur each other from filling the vacuum of power that had been formed by the Second World War (Ross 14). The Americans had a policy in the cold war that was known as ‘containment’ which was used for confining communism in areas where it best existed. In essence, numerous methods were used by the Americans to wage the presence of Cold War. They were able to use dollars as the primary instrument of war where they channeled massive amount of economic aid to its allies to ensure that non communist government were strengthen.

For instance, the United States gave a grant of 12.5 to the Western Europe as an economic aid between 1948 -1952 (Wohlforth 15). They used military force to face off with the communist indirectly with the invasion of Asia, Korea and Vietnam in a bid to defeat communism internationally. Soon after 1950, United States continuously held the position of the military preparedness, over and above, maintaining a great peacetime army. In addition, the United States succeeded in developing an atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb.

This was to be later countered by the Sovient Union, and as the war progressed, both the nuclear weapons and the systems of delivery became more sophisticated. When war emerged, the United States quickly recruited friendly nations into systems of alliances (Wohlforth 7). Around 1949, most nations within the Western Europe were organized into a military alliance known as the National Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) while the communist states belonging to the Eastern Europe was the Warsaw Pact after 1955.

In the mid 1950, the Americans were able to build up a global network of anti-communist military coalition that comprised of the Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Australasia and Latin America (Ross 9). The United States financed two radio stations, namely Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty which were set up in