Paper Summary:

This paper presents the history of the Berlin Wall that indicates that the United States was equally responsible for it as the Soviet Union because, unlike other major Cold War events like the Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. neglected to get involved. Next, the author underscores that the East German citizens freed themselves with no help from the United States or opposition from the collapsed Soviet Union. The paper concludes that the United States or any other country cannot take the final credit for the end of the Cold War but rather it can only be attributed to its victims finally upraising.

From the Paper:

"President John F. Kennedy had previously called for a build-up of U.S. military in preparation for conflict between West Germany and the Warsaw Pact; yet he offered little response to the building of the wall: "Washington made it clear that only if the Soviets and their East German proteges tried to blockade or invade West Berlin would war become a possibility." Though the United States had worked with the Soviets post-war to divide Germany, had abandoned the weakened country to be picked apart by the Soviet Union and Poland, and had sat on the sidelines while the Soviets overran East Germany with the communist experiment, still we did nothing but shake an ambivalent fist.
"Life for East Germans was terrible. They became a pinched limb of the larger state, cut off from resources and infrastructure, losing citizens to flight and death, and "things only continued to get worse throughout the 70s and 80s as Communism and the USSR began to collapse" (Berlin). The United States played a major role in the stirring and in the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union while the bastard child of the Communist-capitalist conflict, for which the United States was also responsible, wavered and whimpered unnoticed as its economy collapsed."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Taylor, Fredrick. "The Berlin Wall." History Today. February 2007: 43-49.
• "The Berlin Wall." Berlin-life.com. May 2008. November 29, 2008. http://www.berlin-life.com/berlin/wall

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