Cold War is the word used to explain the post-World War II struggle stuck between the United States and its allies and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies. Throughout the Cold War period, which lasted from the mid-1940s until the end of the 1980s, international politics were greatly twisted by the concentrated opposition between these two great blocs of power and the political ideologies they represented: democracy and capitalism in the case of the United States and its allies, and Communism in the case of the Soviet bloc. The most important allies of the United States during the Cold War included Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, and Canada. On the Soviet side were a lot of the countries of Eastern Europe—including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and Romania—and, during parts of the Cold War, Cuba and China. Countries that had no formal commitment to either bloc were known as neutrals or, within the Third World, as independent nations.
Innovative challenges inspired American foreign policy curtly after the end of World War II. Having long avoided lasting worldwide commitments, the United States found itself at the center of a great association that sought to prevent the expansion of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and in other areas of Western interest. Soviet effort of power over Poland, Hungary, and the Balkans led the United States, under the leadership of President Harry S. Truman, to institute a policy of containment to prevent the spread of Communism around the world. In 1947 Secretary of State George E. Marshall outlined his design for European recovery, the Marshall Plan. One of the plan’s goals was to reconstruct West Germany as a strong ally and buffer against westward Soviet expansion...........
