From 1945 until 1989 the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in what came to be called a “Cold War.” Although characterized as “cold” rather than “hot” because it involved little direct military engagement between the two parties, this conflict nevertheless proved enormously costly to not only the two primary countries involved, but also to the numerous surrogate nations who bore the struggle’s most severe effects.

This period of extreme tension had a monumental impact on both the international geopolitical scene and American domestic life and thought.

The Cold War dates from the collapse of the victorious Second World War alliance.

Never particularly happy bedfellows, the United States and Western European allies had temporarily joined forces with the Soviet Union in order to defeat their common enemy Germany. Having successfully repelled Germany from its soil, the Soviet army drove Hitler’s troops back to Berlin and occupied the eastern half of Germany, including the capital. During their western sweep, the Soviets also recaptured much of Eastern Europe, and proved reluctant to release their prizes. The Cold War emerged from this struggle to reshape the postwar political map.

Whatever sense of alliance America felt with the Soviet Union during the war rapidly disappeared after it ended. At the Yalta Conference of the major successful powers in February 1945, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, had agreed in principle to hold free elections in the liberated countries as soon as possible. None happened, however, and within two years the Eastern European bloc—countries whose connection lay primarily in their shared political and economic allegiance to the Soviet Union—had solidified. The former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in 1946 to describe the Soviet Union’s hold over Eastern Europe.

In 1947 President Harry Truman declared an American responsibility to respond to the yearnings of “free peoples” around the world. This “Truman Doctrine” was aimed specifically at countries with a perceived potential for “becoming” communist. In the same year, policy expert George Kennan wrote an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, which encouraged the United States to counter what it viewed as Soviet expansionism by engaging the Soviet Union in local conflicts. This policy known as “containment,” came to dominate American foreign policy for the next forty years. It called for American involvement in countries throughout the world if a threat of communism was identified. It was this policy of “containment” that most profoundly determined the “Cold War.” This policy was first played out on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 until 1953. The Cold War became “hot” as the Americans, Russians and Chinese engaged in the first of several “surrogate” conflicts that pitted the Americans against communist enemies— some real, some less so. Although a “surrogate” conflict, over 33,000 American soldiers died in Korea and a precedent for armed intervention was set.

America’s containment imperative drove it to many other controversial policy decisions. For example, the Eisenhower administration toppled leaders in Iran and Guatemala with whose policies they disagreed. “Containment” also provided American leaders with the ideological justification to fund initially the French efforts to put down anti-colonial nationalists in Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Ultimately, America took over that war; between 1963 and 1975, 56,000 American soldiers died in the Vietnam War.

While the international geopolitical impact of this ideological competition became self-evident, its effect on domestic policy proved equally profound. American fear of communism produced an obsessive concern that communists living in America might somehow bring down the country’s democratic institutions. Determined to resist such a fate, American leaders compulsively searched for anyone espousing views that they felt resembled ideas promoted by communism. Everything from discussions of economic disparity to concerns over racial prejudice came under the heading of suspect ideas.

People speaking such thoughts became suspect themselves. Actual communists were arrested and many who held strong views on social justice, whether communist or not, found themselves under investigation as well. Although this assault on free speech is often credited to Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, a particularly virulent anticommunist senator, anti-communist persecution was a bipartisan activity. Both Democrats and Republicans engaged in ferocious violations of civil liberties and human rights in their quest to “preserve” democratic institutions in America. The legacies of this Cold War in America included years of suspicion and thousands of ruined lives.

One can also trace the shattered remnants of civil society in the 1960s to a controversial foreign policy abroad. American youth began to resist the apparently endless struggle against a communist enemy who seemed to offer little direct threat. By the end of the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of protestors angrily voiced loud dissent at Cold War strategies. From the so-called “war at home” over Vietnam to the growing antinuclear movement, the “Cold War consensus” (the presumed domestic support for containment policies) began to unravel.

The official collapse of the Soviet Union as a dominant communist state provides the “date” for the end of the Cold War. Faced with a weakened economy and the forces of the international global marketplace, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier, began a policy of “glasnost” (openness) in the mid-1980s. By 1989 it became clear that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev would no longer enforce iron discipline on its satellites. When the Berlin Wall (erected by the Soviets in 1961) began to come down in November 1989, the end was near. Within a few months, the Soviet “monolith” had collapsed—its authority undermined throughout the Eastern bloc and communism itself rejected within what soon came to be “Russia.” Attitudes towards Cuba, nonetheless, reflect this lingering heritage.

The cultural meanings of the Cold War are legion as well—from the definitions of American family, home and values in media to the blacklisting of suspect communists in Hollywood. One also sees its schizophrenia at work in cultural works, exhibitions and ideologies projecting American values into global competition, whether directly or indirectly in Hollywood, and concerns at home with dire and subversive threats. These concerns, again, could be expressed directly (in mysteries, spy movies and related genres or films like The Manchurian Candidate, 1962), while also underpinning the unease of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Cultural critics, including academics, media makers and activists, also attacked policies and mentalities of the Cold War in a range of resistance from Noam Chomsky to Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr Strangelove (1962).

Indeed, the Cold War became intimately enmeshed with both high culture and everyday life for decades.

The Cold War dominated American foreign and domestic policy for over forty years.

Its impacts are still being felt as the United States remains uncertain as to its role in the world if it is not engaged in an ideological battle with an overarching enemy.