The Cold War
When the nation is at war, people bleed in every area of life, ranging from political, cultural, and economical. The cold war to be precise was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states and the United States with its allies. The Cold War began after World War Two with main enemies as the United States and the Soviet Union. The name originated from the fact that both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly in a physical war using nuclear weapons in fear that the weapons were too hazardous (Day, 2016). So, instead, both sides fought each other indirectly. They supported opposing sides in conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look foolish.
The cold war served a big blow to the politics of the United States of America. Some of the significant effects include: It led to the division of the world into two power blocks. Political theorists view it in terms of the ‘bipolarity’ of world politics. Of which, the USA and its allies led one pole; the other was dominated by erstwhile USSR (now Russia) and its associates of Eastern Europe. This enhanced unhealthy competition among the two poles because both power blocks made extraneous efforts to increase their area of influence. USSR provoked America by roping American Latin countries like Venezuela and Argentina (Khan, 2012). USA retaliated by making efforts to contain USSR by eastward extension of NATO. The cold war subverted the capacity of the UN to maintain peace and security in the world. The rivalry between the warring nations made every consensus on central issues of order & safety in the Security Council a nightmare. This rivalry reduced the United Nations to the status of a mere spectator in the face of wars and conflicts.
The American culture wasn’t spared either. The Cold War became a driving force behind popular culture for decades. Themes such as nuclear war, dystopia, and espionage permeated film and literature, among other mediums were all powered by the cold war. The impact on American culture was evident during the 1950s and 1960s. The mentioned period was a prosperity era for American society, whereby many nations around the world felt the influence of American ways of life and the expressions of its culture (levering, 2016). despite American affluence, the spread of communism and the threat of global atomic war plagued Americans with a sense of constant danger both from within and without. The fear was magnified in films and other cultural products, reflecting a fear of a possible communist invasion. Another factor was repression of political dissent in the early 1950s, which affected the popular culture. Expert artists such as Jules Dassin were suspected of being political subversives. The “paranoid style,” defined by scholar Richard Hofstadter as a recurrent feature of American politics culminating during the Cold War, equally affected the cultural production of the era. With the climax of the USSR, the paranoid style shifted its focus to the rise of international terrorism and, “the axis of evil”—a term that recalls President Reagan’s branding of the Soviet Union and its satellites as “the empire of evil.” As a propaganda tool, “national security agencies encouraged Hollywood to produce anti-communist movies and further urged that film scripts be changed to remove references to less-than-praiseworthy aspects of American history”. This led to a series of movies that helped spark patriotism, but also raised suspicion of communist activity in America. This moved later ruined the lives of dozens of Americans’ during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings against suspected communists in Hollywood(Day, 2016). .. Some communists were rooted out based on weak evidence and unsubstantiated accusations. The only positive effect of the cold war on American culture was banning discrimination by establishing fair employment commissions and passed laws that supported the same. This move went a long way in eradicating racism by undoing the separate but equal doctrine.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States of America saw economic prosperity and a dramatic improvement in its standards of living. This gave the US a huge degree of power in the international arena, but to win the cold war, the United States became a low-savings and a high consumption economy. It supported its allies in recovery; development and growth process that out consumed USSR and china. The States became the global consumer of last resort for the export goods of first Germany and Japan — and later all the countries surrounding the USSR and China (Khan, 2012). In the early decades of the Cold War, the United States and U.S.-backed international financial institutions were net suppliers of capital to Iron Curtain allies to finance recovery and import-substitution development strategies. The matching consumption-led and export-led economics pursued by the United States and its Cold War allies were optimal for addressing the priority of winning the Cold War — but not for a non-war environment.
Conclusively, the cold war had both negative and positive effects on the culture, economy and politics of the United States of America. Some lives gained value while others were scattered in terms of careers, professions and wealth. Most of the effects weigh much on the negative side, a clear indicator that future cold wars should be discouraged for peaceful coexistence among citizens.
Works Cited
Day, Meredith. The Cold War. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2016.
Kahn, Albert E. The Game of Death: Effects of the Cold War on Our Children. 2012.
Levering, Ralph B. The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.