The Cold War United States Politics Essay — страница 2

spend money on something and turn around and spend more money to take it apart. the United States should wake up from its Cold War dream and start to face the reality of the twenty first century. Increasing military strength always leads to a fear and mistrust by other countries and an arms race by Realism’s way of thinking. There is no real winner or loser in an arms race. At the begin of the Cold War right after World War II, the United States was the strongest state in the world by far. It manufactured about fifty percent of goods and had about seventy percent of the gold reserves in the world at the time.(1) But fifty years later in 1996, the United States has the biggest national deficit ever seen in the whole world. When we walked in to twenty first century, there are

more ways to keep the world in peace than just military strength, and economic strength also plays important role in world environment. It was Japan and Germany, the two economic giants, helped to pay for the gulf war. Without them paying the bill(2), United States could not handle the financial burden from the war by itself. Thirdly, the U. S military force is trained to defend America and not to be a global policeman. I often heard the complaints from fellow soldiers who got deployed overseas on such peace-keeping missions because they were going to be away from their family and moral of the troops was not too high when I was in the army. Sometimes, such global police action does not work out as it has planned, for example the country has a major ethnic conflict such as in

Somalia, the U. S military was supposed to bring peace to the people of Somalia and feed the hungry in 1993. A year later, the U. S military did not bring peace to this chaotic state, but instead heavily engaged in fighting with the warlord in its civil war. It is possible to recall the vivid image of a dead U.S service man’s body which was dragged by the warlord’s soldier across the street of Mogadishu on CNN. Then United States quickly took all of its military forces out of Somalia in 1994 and the fighting is still going on to this day. Finally, the United States should use its other influences than its military strength to keep the world in peace. Every country in the world looked at the U.S as the leader of democracy, and today U.S is still the most powerful country in

terms of economic. All the international trade is calculated in the demontion of U.S dollars and the United States manufactures about 25 percent of goods in global trade. Sometimes economic strengths are more powerful and work better in dealing with other countries. A good example was the global joint effort of economic sanctions against the South African government which subsequently gave up its discriminating racial policies and released it leading civil right leader, Mr. Nelson Mandla, who was elected as the first black President in South Africa’s history in 1995. Another example was when by keeping the communication channels opening, and with its influences, the United States helped Israel and Palestine to sign the historic peace agreement between th ese two states at the

white House in 1995. This ended the forty years of fighting between these two states. The agreement brought peace to the mid- east area at last and ended the ethnic fighting for good. Another good example was the joint efforts from United States, Russia and China, to bring about a free election in the small South-East Asia country of Cambodia after thirty years of civil war. Democracy was back to camblia and the people of Cambodia could enjoy their peaceful lives finally. Having world peace does not mean that the United States must wave a big stick at other countries so everybody else in the international community behaves according to the standard of the United States. Realism thinks that by having larger military with greater strength alone will maintain world peace, but global

cooperation and communication are probably more important than military strength. Instead of military confrontation, the United States should assume its responsibilities as the leader of democracy by keeping cooperation and communication channels open with other countries so that world peace will and can be preserved.