Throughout the Cold War the United States of America saw economic prosperity and a dramatic improvement in its standards of living. This gave the US a huge degree of power in the international arena, but to what degree did this power help it to claim victory in the Cold War? This essay will weigh up the ways in which the economic supremacy of the US led to their victory in the Cold War against the ways in which its foreign policy may have helped. These views will then be criticised and evaluated to conclude that each was important in different ways due to it being the economic power that enabled the US to pursue financially intensive foreign policies such as the arms race and enabled it to negotiate from a position of strength with the USSR in the 1980s.
