Cuban Missile Crisis and the International System Essay - 1

Cuban Missile Crisis and the International System - Essay Example Cold War – this pair of words was perhaps one of the most often used political terms in the last fifty years. Today this phrase is widely accepted in historical writings referring to the period between 1947-1948 and 1989-1990. Usually scholars associate it with nuclear confrontation between the Soviets and the United States, and the arms race that put the whole world on the brink of a devastating military clash . The Cold War was characterized by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding when the United States accused the USSR of attempts to swell the Communist doctrine throughout the world while the Soviets, in its turn, charged the United States with imperialist ways. The nature of the Cold War, its causes and outcomes are not yet clear: any scholar who explores the theme will inevitably face a series of controversial issues, such as inevitability of the Cold War, the role of personalities in escalation of the tension, the factors, economic, political or ideological that played the key role in the War, etc. The ideological aspect of the communist – capitalist confrontation was apparently the core thread of the Cold War. The wider notion of this conflict posits â€Å"†¦ as a distinctive period into the ideological struggle, originated in 1917-18, between the Wilsonian Impulse and Lenin's urge for peoples' democracy as the basis for securing peace† . Being the first impulse for emergence of the bipolar world, the ideological antagonism played the key role in changing threat perceptions and shifts of balance throughout confrontation. The Cuban Missile Crisis represented an important milestone in this confrontation: it was probably the first time in modern history that the two world leading superpowers realized their high vulnerability and mutual dependence.