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The Cold War was a protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic confrontation that emerged after the Second World War between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States, supported by their respective and emerging alliance partners. The struggle was called the Cold War because it did not involve direct armed conflict between the main protagonists (though many smaller military conflicts were fought on the periphery). The Cold War was instead waged mainly by means of diplomacy, economics, selective aid, intimidation, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale proxy wars. The Cold War period also witnessed the largest arms race (both conventional and nuclear) in history, leading to widespread global fears of a Third World War and nuclear Armageddon. The conflict was fuelled by the Soviet Union and its allies, whose principles of centrally planned economies, was in opposition to the United States and its allies, including Canada, who favored capitalism and democratic foundations to their societies.

The Cold War spanned over four decades, from approximately 1947 (exact dates are controversial) until the decline and collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the late 1980s, with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 generally considered the end of the Cold War.

The United States was involved with several different alliances, such as NATO (created in 1949, of which Canada was a member), CENTO and SEATO. The Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact as a response to the creation of NATO . Both the US and USSR had several relationships outside their official treaties, in the case of the latter, nations such as North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba and Syria were particularly important.

From 1960, both the People's Republic of China and Albania promoted their own version of Communism in opposition to key Soviet policies, and nations such as Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Austria, India, Sweden, Finland, and Sudan maintained a conspicuous neutrality through membership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an international organization formed throughout the 1960s and eventually coming to number over 100 separate states. The purpose of the organization, stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979, was to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries (i.e. countries allied with neither the US nor the USSR) in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, racism, including Zionism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics".

Origins

The roots of the Cold War lay in the policies of the two "super powers" to emerge from the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR). Relations began to be strained in Feb 1945 when it became apparent at the Yalta conference, held by the leaders of Britain, the US, and the USSR, that wartime leader Joseph Stalin intended to strongly control most of Eastern Europe after the war. Wartime relations were held together in the common interest of the Allies, though mistrust was certainly present. No formal alliance was made between the two, and despite the massive amounts of aid going to the Soviet Union in the form of war materiel, the relationship was more a personal one between President Franklin Roosevelt and Premier Stalin.

The "Big Three" at Yalta, Feb 1945.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin Roosevelt, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union.
Yalta decided the fate of post-war Europe. US Government Photo.

Relations before the war between the two nations were not friendly from 1933 to 1940, especially in light of the Soviet non-aggression pact with Germany. Some historians have traced the seeds back as far as Lenin's seizure of power in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of a Communist state, some trace the US-USSR conflict to the 1890s and rivalry between the post-Civil War United States and Czarist Russia as a result of activity by both nations in Manchuria.

Political Alignments, 1980. Map adapted from wikipedia.org.