The Infinity of Words

The Cold War of America and the USSR — A Deep, Honest, and Unignorable Study 1. Origins of the Cold War When two global victors refused to trust each other, the peace that followed World War II became the seedbed of a new era of rivalry. The Cold War grew directly from the wreckage of World War II: two superpowers—an industrial, capitalist United States and a territorially vast Soviet Union hardened by invasion—came out of the conflict with clashing visions for the world’s political and economic order. The United States pushed for markets, liberal democracies, and open trade; the Soviet Union insisted on security through buffer zones and state-directed socialist economies. Those fundamental ideological differences—communism versus capitalism—combined with wartime distrust and competing security priorities to produce a prolonged political, economic, and military rivalry rather than a conventional war. Encyclopedia Britannica 2. Political Tension The map of postwar Europe divided...