America's Way of Living

America’s Way of Living

There is no doubt that America at one time or another was the world leader on many different levels. For years, America has been the world leader from a military and economic perspective. At no point was this clearer to America and the world than at the conclusion of World War II. The conclusion of World War II propelled America into an even stronger role of leadership. However, since the conclusion of World War II, America, with both its decisions, militarily and economically, has steadily declined and the perception of America has changed both home and abroad.
Many decisions the United States made after World War II enhanced America and its allies. Germany, England, and Japan’s military and economy were destroyed because of the war, whereas America was the only one of the Western Allies whose economy had not been ruined by the war. The United States became a world superpower for the first time after it began to help rebuild Europe by supplying them with money and military goods. After dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Japan surrendered to America and its allies and the war was officially over. Japan knew how powerful we were and what we were capable of so they gave in before matters grew worse than the bombings. The Soviet Union, also known as the other superpower in the world and our former allies, got their hands on the atomic bomb secrets and the tensions postwar began to rise. “Although the Soviet Union suffered more than 20 million casualties, both civilian and military, it emerged with the largest standing army in world history” (Kallen 5).   Joseph Stalin, Russia’s leader, ordered the USSR to take control of Eastern Europe while “North Korea developed its own atomic weapons program and challenged the United States for world domination” (Kallen 6). As tensions grew and the variety of weapons expanded, the atomic bomb was abandoned in favor of the hydrogen bomb. The hydrogen bomb had...