Who Won the Cold War?

Historians who believe that the U.S. won the Cold War largely agree that American victory was guaranteed through finances. The United States bled Soviets coffers dry through proxy wars and the nuclear arms race. But this financial drain may not have been possible without the unprecedented stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

The world came as close as it ever has to the brink of nuclear war between Oct. 18 and 29, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The showdown over the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of the tip of Florida in the U.S., culminated in the USSR's withdrawal. In a flurry of communications, Russia agreed to remove the missiles in Cuba if the U.S. agreed not to invade the island. The U.S. also agreed to withdraw its missiles from Turkey. The situation was tense enough to inspire the creation of the hotline between Washington and Moscow to head off any future nuclear tensions.

But the USSR still resolved to outpace the U.S. in nuclear capabilities. This intense nuclear research and development didn't come cheap, as the U.S. matched the Soviets' nuclear strides. In 1963, the United States spent 9 percent of the nation's gross domestic product on defense — nearly $53.5 billion (that's around $458 billion in 2022 dollars) [source: UPI].

Throughout the 1960s, the U.S. continued to bolster its nuclear arsenal. However, during the '70s, the Ford and Carter administrations favored sharp criticism of Soviet policies over stockpiling nuclear arms. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he reinvigorated defense spending, increasing the defense budget by 35 percent.

Many historians credit Reagan with dealing the death blows that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. Perhaps the one that signaled the end for the USSR was Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This uncompleted project, popularly called Star Wars, would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It called for the weaponization of outer space — a shield comprised of a network of nuclear missiles and lasers that would intercept a Soviet nuclear first strike. The SDI initiative was the pinnacle of both the space race and the arms race between the U.S. and the USSR.

Star Wars was criticized as fantasy by defense observers on both sides of the Iron Curtain (the term coined by Winston Churchill that describes the boundary in Europe between communism and the rest of the world). But Reagan was committed to the project, and the Soviet's flagging, state-owned economy simply couldn't match this escalation in defense spending.

Part of the USSR's monetary woes came from pouring funds into Afghanistan. In 1979, the Soviets invaded and occupied the country. The Truman Doctrine had clearly stipulated that American policy was to contain the spread of communism throughout the world, so the U.S. responded by secretly supporting and training the Mujahedeen (Arabic for "strugglers"), insurgent rebels who rallied against Soviets in Afghanistan. The U.S. overwhelmingly showed support for the Mujahedeen, and the Soviet invasion grew protracted and expensive. Ultimately, the Afghanis defeated the USSR, and the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

But not everyone agrees the end of communism was the result of the United States' deep pockets. Some historians assert that the USSR had lived its natural life span and the U.S. was merely a witness to its death.

Some schools of thought insist that communism is simply unsupportable on a large scale. Therefore, the decline of the USSR was inevitable. So can anyone be declared a winner in a war if one of the opponents ends itself as a political entity? That depends on how you look at it. The U.S. was left as the last man standing in the Cold War. And any boxing fan can tell you that the last man standing is the one who wins.

Moves were being made inside the USSR that would hasten its end. Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who served as Reagan's Cold War counterpart, introduced sweeping reforms that fundamentally altered the social, political and economic fabric of the USSR. Gorbachev's perestroika ("restructuring") plan opened up the state-owned economy to some private ownership, creating the transition to a free-market economy. But the economic backlash against this radical and rapid transition was unable to sustain the Soviet Union. Widespread problems like poverty and food shortages plagued the country.

These problems may have had less of an effect on the disintegration of the USSR had it not been for Gorbachev's other major reform. Glasnost ("openness") essentially reversed the USSR's policies of brutal totalitarianism and suppression of government criticism and free speech.

Under glasnost, workers could strike, journalists could publish editorials in opposition to the Kremlin and protestors could assemble. The combination of the political and economic reforms of perestroika and the social freedom given by glasnost helped contribute to a grassroots revolution in the USSR that led to the replacement of a single-party communist system with a multi-party democratic system.

So if the USSR died of natural causes or essentially dissolved itself, who deserves the title of Cold War victor? There was actually more than one winner. Certainly, democracy won as it replaced the one-party communist system in not only the USSR member states, but also in Soviet satellite states. The free market won, too, as did transnational corporations that suddenly had billions more customers after the fall of the USSR. And really, the entire world won, having emerged from the Cold War without suffering complete nuclear annihilation.