Question

COLD WAR DISCUSSION What was the reason for the breakdown in friendly relations between the United States and the Soviet Union? How has this shaped history for the last 50+ years? During the Cold War, politics abroad and politics at home were connected. How so? How did actions abroad shape beliefs at home or vice versa?

Answer 1

It's fair to say the US and the Soviet Union had an uneasy friendship and partnership from the beginning. All countries had joined through their shared aim of fighting Nazi Germany (as well as Japan) during World War II. Once this was done, they had nothing to hold in decent conditions.
Soon after the war, debates emerged over what to do with the Germans-liberated nations. In other respects, it had become an political schism. Both the United States and Great Britain backed the concept of creating democratic nation-states. The Soviet Union preferred to see Communist countries working within its sphere of control.

The idea of making such nations act as a physical barrier between the Soviet Union and the West was also liked.
The United States 'new nuclear capabilities have soured relationships. The Soviets understood that, while they had a large army, the acquisition of the nuclear bomb by the United States was a destabilizing factor

The most common way of interpreting the conflict's outcomes is as spanning 50 years, culminating with US victory, propelling it to hegemon status worldwide.

However, I would say the USA has changed a lot during that period. The USA that is the hegemon of the world is a USA that assassinated the Kennedy clan and impeached Nixon. It is also a United States that has rapidly increased household consumption at the expense of bringing all the households into high debt. Poetically speaking, in the present it is simply the USA which has spent its own future fighting over the USSR.

The US financial and social capital procured by the plundering of the ex-Soviet bloc is just running out. But now it is ripped apart by what is basically an internal cold war, its waning global power, and the American Dream, for which the USSR has lost its present, dead. Whereas Russia is growing.

As a result the Cold War stakes were incredibly high. The first H-bomb test in the Marshall Islands Eniwetok atoll revealed how terrifying the nuclear age could be. It created a fireball of 25 square miles which vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent experiments by the US and the Soviet spewed nuclear waste into the soil. The ever-present nuclear proliferation threat has had a huge impact on American domestic life. The people in their backyards built bomb shelters. In schools, and other public locations, they conducted assault drills. The 1950s and 1960s saw an explosion of famous films with images of nuclear destruction and alien monsters terrifying moviegoers. The Cold War has been a relentless force in the daily lives of Americans, in these and other respects.