The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

This term came to describe the nearly half-century of security competition between the United States and its allies on one side, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. The seeds of the Cold War—a term some attribute to the author George Orwell in 1945—were planted in the latter days of World War II, as Germany fell to the armies of the US and UK in the West and the USSR in the East. Each society had been trained to be highly suspicious of the other, and while they were able to put their suspicions aside to fight a common enemy, the defeat of that enemy brought their conflicts back to center stage, especially since the end of the war left the US and USSR as the dominant powers on the planet. Their rivalry would play out all over the world, from the formal division of Germany in the 1940s to the battle for clients in the so-called “Third World,” mostly former colonies who pledged neutrality but might lean toward US or Soviet sponsorship. Though some scholars refer to this period as “the long peace” due to the absence of direct conflict between the superpowers, their sponsorship of local conflicts led to millions of deaths.