Abstract

How we ended the cold war

The three main interpretations of the cold war's demise reflect the right, center and left of U.S. politics. Since the tearing down of the Berlin wall, the right wing has claimed a resounding victory for U.S. president Ronald Reagan's military buildup and tough talk. The rapid expansion of the U.S. military spending, it is argued, also threatened Moscow with bankruptcy. Centrists, typically visible as the Democratic Party leadership, argued that the forty-year effort to check and reverse Soviet influence was a bipartisan endeavor. There is a third view, which sees the cold war as a logical and reprehensible outgrowth of a U.S. political system seemingly dependent on military spending for prosperity, willing to put the whole world at risk for its perfervid anticommunism.