The cold war. A heated conflict divided the world into two poles

The Cold War was an indirect political, ideological and sometimes military confrontation that took place during 1947-1991 between the world's two largest powers after World War II, the United States of America and the Soviet Union. One manifestation was the division of the world into two camps: a communist led by the Soviet Union and a liberal led by the United States.

Historical
context Western countries, led by the United States, France and Britain, allied themselves with the Soviet Union during World War II out of fear of the common Nazi enemy. It was clear that ideological contradiction and the heated conflict of interests would not delay in revealing itself if the war ended.

The Yalta Conference (February 1945) exposed the prevailing mistrust between the Western Allies and the Soviets, although Britain and the United States accepted Soviet territorial gains that were contrary to what the Allies had agreed during the war.

The United States and Western Europe were wary of the Soviet Union leapfrogging annexation or trusteeship of Eastern European countries, and these fears were confirmed by the Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945) and Soviet President Joseph Stalin's refusal to hold democratic elections in Poland, fueling a heated rift that reached a spud two years later.

The Soviet Union's ambitions to dominate Eastern Europe led US President Harry Truman in 1947 to declare his intention to counter Soviet expansion, confronting it with a "containment" strategy, which consists of besieging the expansion of communism by a range of means, including proposing economic support for European countries that want to remain free outside the Soviet umbrella.

Washington thus launched the famous "Marshall Plan" – which consists in supporting Europe economically to rebuild its war-ravaged countries and block Soviet hegemony by helping a battered Europe.

Stalin responded to the U.S. move to consolidate his control over socialist countries (then called popular democracies) by establishing in 1947 the Cominform, a forum of communist parties in European countries that included most of the communist formations of Eastern Europe, and in which the French and Italian Communist parties participated from Western countries and had a large popular presence in their countries.

Through this forum, Moscow sought to frame and guide the ideological and political development of its member countries and parties. Thus, the Soviet counter-strategy was born, considering that the world was divided into two camps: one "democratic" anti-imperialist led by the Soviet Union, and the other "undemocratic imperialist" led by the United States.

Europe thusfound itself divided between the two major camps in a global conflict known politically and in the media as the "Cold War", especially after the coup d'état of the communists in Czechoslovakia (1948) and their liquidation of their political opponents and the empowerment of the Soviets from the country.

The Prague coup warned that the next step might be Germany, so the Western countries responded by declaring Germany a stronghold to fight communism, and the three main Western countries (the United States, Britain and France) decided to unify their areas of influence in Germany and minted a currency for the western part of it.

Stalin's response was not long enough to announce the closure of all land and rail routes leading to Berlin to push Westerners to leave their areas of influence in the city, and the United States responded by establishing an air bridge to supply the city, and threatened to use force if the Soviets intercepted air traffic in the originally agreed corridors.

Stalin backed down for fear of a military confrontation with the world's only nuclear power and the lifting of the blockade, and the Berlin crisis ended with the division of Germany into two states.

The relations of the two global camps witnessed an important shift after the death of Soviet leader Stalin in 1953, as his successor Nikita Khrushchev adopted a more conciliatory policy and Westerners found their way, especially since at that stage the West witnessed an escalation in voices against American hegemony, expressed by the position of French President General Charles de Gaulle, who strongly criticized - since his return to power in 1958 - what he called "American tutelage", and then ended up withdrawing France from NATO leadership in 1966.

Within the Eastern camp, the People's China began to rival the Soviet Union to such an extent that hostility broke with the two in 1960.

Despite this, the two camps remained in hostility and rivalry that sometimes approached the "brinkmanship", and was expressed by their alignment in areas of armed conflict around the world (the Korean War, the rebel movements in Latin America, the Congo-Namibia war, the Arab-Israeli conflict... However, the Cuban crisis of 1962 was the most important confrontation and almost plunged the world into a devastating nuclear war.

Peaceful coexistence between the two major camps dominated the stage of international relations from the early seventies until the fall of the Soviet Union completely in 1991, and then the world entered a new phase, the era of unipolarity led by the United States.