During the fifty years after World War II, the Cold War was waged between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. While the Cold War never erupted in direct military conflict between the two superpowers, there were military conflicts between the two, like the Korean War in which the communist government of North Korea was supported by the Soviets while the South Korean democratic government was backed by the United States. That conflict ended after three years in an agreement between the two sides that left the prewar borders pretty much the same as they were before the war. However, another crisis during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly erupted into a nuclear arms confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, the Cold War basically came to an end as the Soviet economy collapsed during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when George Bush and newly elected Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to lessen ideological differences and Bush called for the formation of a new world order. Ideology is the key word because the Cold War was basically an ideological war fought between the democratic forces in the West and the communist forces in the East, “The Cold War was a period of East-West competition, tension, and conflict short of full-scale war, characterized by mutual perceptions of hostile intention between military-political alliances or blocs. There were real wars, sometimes called ‘proxy wars’ because they were fought by Soviet allies rather than the USSR itself-along with competition for influence in the Third World, and a major superpower arms race” (Cold War 1).
The Cold War basically began after the three superpowers of the time (the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia) failed to live up to their post-World War II agreements. The main bone of contention between the east and the west was the division of Germany and the fate of the nations it had conquered during the war. At the conference in...