The Cold War, which dominated much of world politics through the four decades after the end of World War II, had essentially two faces. One face, symbolized by the Berlin Wall, was the "cold" face of the US Soviet confrontation: massive forces arrayed on either side of a dividing line, perpetual tension, espionage, but almost no actual fighting. This was the Cold War in the center of American and Soviet geopolitical interests and conflict.
Another, quite different face of the Cold War was seen at the "periphery" from southeastern Europe in the 1940s to Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s, to Central America and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In these regions, American and Soviet forces were nearly as reluctant to confront one another directly as they were along the Iron Curtain in Central Europe. Yet this did not lead to a standoff without fighting. Instead, around the world through parts of five decades, American and Soviet clients sometimes governments, sometimes "resistance" forces engaged in active combat, at times backed up by "advisors" or even regular forces of one or the other superpower.
The first of these armed "Cold War" confrontations took place in the birthplace of Western civilization, Greece, during the middle and late 1940s. It began nearly two years before World War II itself ended. At the beginning, the supporting power on the Western side was Britain, not the United States indeed, the U.S. held itself sharply and critically aloof from British policy in the first phases of the conflict. (The Soviets, for their part, seem never to have taken an active part.) But by 1947, Greece would become the centerpiece of the Truman Doctrine, proclaimed as such in Truman's "all out speech" of March 12, 1947 (Yergin, 1977: 280ff). By the time the civil war ended, eighty thousand Greeks were dead, and about a tenth of the population had been forced to leave their homes at one time or anot...