Cold War

The Cold War is the name given to the relationship that developed primarily between the USA and the USSR after World War Two. The primary American goal of 1945-1948 was to rescue Europe from the devastation of World War II and to contain the expansion of Communism, represented by the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 provided military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey to counteract the threat of Communist expansion in the Balkans. In 1948, the United States replaced piecemeal financial aid programs with a comprehensive Marshall Plan, which pumped money into the economy of Western Europe, and removed trade barriers, while modernizing the managerial practices of businesses and governments.

In August 1949 the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, there by escalating the risk of warfare. Indeed, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented both powers from going too far, and resulted in proxy wars, especially in Korea and Vietnam, in which the two sides did not directly confront each other.

In the decades after World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class culture became obsessed with consumer goods.

In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid 1980s, the new Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika and glasnost. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. They reached a breaking point when Gorbachev refused to use Soviet troops to support the faltering government of East Germany in late 1989. Within weeks all the satellite states broke free from Moscow in a peaceful wave of revolutions. The pressures escalated inside the Soviet Union, where Communism fell and the USSR was formally dissolved in late 1991. The United States remained as the world’s only superpower.