The End of the Cold War for grade 11 ppt

A Power point about the End of the cold War for grade 11

1. The End of the
Cold War

2. The 3 main dimensions of the Cold War:

Ideological
Communism vs. capitalism, revolutionary processes

Geopolitical
The Soviet Union’s emergence after WWII as the
strongest power in Eurasia

Military
The arms race
What changed by the 1980s:

3. IDEOLOGY
Capitalism boomed
The information revolution
Globalization
New dynamism of the market system
Decline of the Global Left
Deepening crisis of state socialism: growing
attractiveness of liberal ideas (markets and democracy)
Western social democracy successful and stalled
The end of decolonization
The rise of the New Right; Thatcher and Reagan
Free markets as the universal solution
Militant anticommunism
Global counteroffensive against the Left
The rise of ethnic and religious nationalism

4. GEOPOLITICS

The Soviet Union’s global influence was declining

China shifted to a semi-alliance with the US

Western Europe was booming, confident,
integrating

In the Middle East, the US worked both sides of the
Arab-Israeli conflict; the USSR was marginalized

In the Third World, USSR was losing allies,
becoming irrelevant

Afghanistan became the turning point in Soviet
fortunes in the Third World

5. THE ARMS RACE

The economic burden: the Soviet economy
increasingly unable to bear it

Political futility of the arms race:
Do arms buy security?
Is major war thinkable?

Nuclear weapons as a global threat

The momentum of arms control: mutual
vulnerability and mutual interest in survival

The rise of new antimilitarism

6. By the mid-1980s, political conditions in the Soviet
Union matured enough to produce a major shift in
favour of all-round systemic reforms. GORBACHEV
To enable the Soviet system to adapt to new world
realities through political and economic reforms,
the Soviet Union needed to get out of the Cold War
“New Thinking” in foreign policy was closely
integrated with the policies of “perestroika”
(restructuring) of the entire Soviet system – a
revolution from above