The Cold War

The United States led a Western alliance of democracies and capitalist economies, formalized in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. The Soviet Union dominated the communist states of Eastern Europe, joined in the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Communist China, after 1949, was at times a Soviet ally and at times a rival. As European empires collapsed, the superpowers also competed for influence across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The Allies of World War II failed to agree on a postwar settlement at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. The Soviet Union treated the Eastern European countries its armies had occupied as its sphere of influence. Mutual suspicion ran deep: the United States had intervened against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. The United States’ atomic monopoly ended when the Soviets tested their own bomb in August 1949.

Containment in Europe (1946–1949). In 1947 diplomat George F. Kennan, writing anonymously as “X,” argued for the long-term containment of Soviet power, and President Harry S. Truman pledged in March 1947 to support “free peoples” resisting subjugation, sending aid to Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in June 1948, the United States and Britain supplied the city by air until the blockade ended in May 1949. NATO was founded the same year.

Militarization and Korea (1949–1953). China’s communist revolution and the Soviet bomb in 1949 alarmed Washington. NSC-68 (1950) called for a massive military buildup. When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States led a UN force in the Korean War. At home, fear of subversion fed McCarthyism.

Arms race and brinkmanship (1952–1962). The United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in 1952; the Soviets followed in 1953. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 set off a space race. In October 1962, the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba brought the superpowers closer to nuclear war than ever before, until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced on October 28 that the missiles would be dismantled and removed.

Later phases (1963–1991). The rivalry continued through the Vietnam War and decades of arms competition and negotiation, until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms opened the way to the end of the Cold War.

• The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947–1948): committed the United States to containing communism.
• 1949: the Soviet atomic bomb, the communist victory in China, and the founding of NATO.
• The Korean War (1950–1953): globalized the Cold War and launched a permanent military buildup.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): the moment the superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.
• 1989–1991: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Communist rule collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989, Gorbachev accepted German reunification, and after a failed hard-line coup in August 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The Cold War reshaped American life. It produced a permanent national security state, a large standing military, and what President Eisenhower in 1961 called the “military-industrial complex.” The space race led to the creation of NASA in 1958. Anticommunism fueled loyalty investigations and was used to attack liberals and civil rights activists. Abroad, NSC-68 called for covert political and psychological warfare as well as military strength, and the United States took on responsibility for maintaining order in regions left by retreating European empires.