cold war
The term Cold War was coined by the American journalist, Walter Lippman in the mid-1940s. It has been used to describe ‘ a state of extreme tension between super powers, stopping short of all-out war but characterised by mutual hostility and involvement in covert warfare and war by proxy as a means of upholding the interests of one against another’ . ... There has been much historical debate on the origins of the Cold War from the 1940s to the present day new ideas have arisen due to the emergence of new evidence. There are three main approaches taken by historians as to the origins of the Cold War, these being: the orthodox or traditional view, the revisionist view and the post-revisionist view. This essay will attempt to analyse the origins of the Cold War from two perspectives, the first being the ideological differences between the US and the USSR, namely communism versus capitalism. ... The Cold War has been seen as a war between two opposing ideologies. ... Some historians, such as Fleming, see the ideological roots of the Cold War reaching as far back as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. US historians of the 1950s saw the Cold War as a ‘fundamental antagonism of the communists for the capital system’ ; this helped to fuel the anti-communist hysteria of the contemporary United States. There is an element of truth in this statement, even though the Cold War was not this one sided, there were obvious oppositions between communism and capitalism. The preservation of world peace following victory in the Second World War was clear. ... The historian Norman Graebner saw that the origins of Cold War were rooted deeply within American history and tradition and in the idea of American Universalism, the US ideology that values of liberty and constitutionalism have world wide applicability.