Major Leaders and the End of the Cold War

 

Aside from those in power in the United States and the Soviet Union, a number of other leaders made significant contributions to their countries during the Cold War. Some of the effects of their policies still impact the world today.

Deng Xiaoping used market-oriented reforms to take China from the verge of economic collapse and make it into an economic powerhouse. China has since become the world's second largest economy. Meanwhile, in India, Indira Gandhi used Cold War tensions to her country's advantage by developing a stronger relationship with the Soviet Union and developing nuclear weapons to balance out the growth of the Chinese military.

Some older world powers also experienced a resurgence during the Cold War. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain during the 1980s, was a political and intellectual partner of President Ronald Reagan against the Soviet Union. They promoted the same economic programs based on free trade and less government regulation of business. Their kinship helped provide a powerful alliance against the Soviet Union. In addition, Thatcher oversaw an expanded role for the British military in protecting its interests around the globe.

Possibly, the leader with the single-greatest impact on the end of the Cold War was Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. Reforms under his glasnost and perestroika policies opened the way for political changes that brought down the Eastern Bloc, as well as the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev's economic reforms had little impact on the communist countries which continued to languish under these policies. The failure of communism as a broad-based economic system made it impossible for the Soviet Union to compete with the West in an arms race. As political reforms took off in the Eastern Bloc, in country after country, the Communists were voted out of office. The governments in these countries fell soon after. Before long, the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was unified.

After the fallen governments in the Eastern Bloc and a failed coup in the Soviet Union, the fifteen Soviet republics declared independence. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. These policies led to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, officially ending the Cold War. With the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and NATO did not have to focus its energy on countering the Soviet threat. NATO began to admit some of its former adversaries from Eastern Europe.