The term Cold War is used to define the period of nearly fifty years following the Second World War during which the United States and Soviet Union competed for world supremacy under the guise of Western bloc and Eastern Bloc.

The bipolar international system was the main decisive factor that shaped the course of international politics during the Cold War.  Superpowers like The USA and the USSR sought to shape the political, military, economic, strategic, and geopolitical attitudes and practices of their respective members. 

Washing had long refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as the rightful rulers of
post-czarist Russia, and did not diplomatically recognize the USSR until Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1933.

The main reason dor the conference was to negotiate the post-war status of Europe.

During the conference American president  Roosevelt died. Harry Truman,who was not as sympathetic as Rosevelt to Stalin’s demands for Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe,suspended Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. In July, he managed to postpone the Potsdam Conference until after the US had detonated its first atomic bomb. 

Not only did Stalin delay withdrawing Soviet troops from northern Iran (who had been stationed there as part of the Anglo-Soviet agreement of 1942 to prevent the Germans from seizing Persian oil), he also demanded territorial concessions from Turkey, control over the Turkish straits, and a role in the administration of Italy’s former North African colonies as a stepping stone for establishing Soviet naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean.

George F Kennan’s(a junior Foreign Service Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow) “Long Telegram” would become the single most influential document in the Cold War. Describing both Russian and the Soviet Union as “impervious to the logic of reason” and “highly sensitive to the logic of force,” the telegram described at length “the instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” that dictated the violent and hard-headed contours of Soviet foreign policy.

Speaking at Westminster College on March 6, 1946, Winston Churchill warned: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain
has descended across the Continent.”

The Truman Doctrine was announced on March 12, 1947 and it was henceforth “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” i.e. communism—starting with Turkey and Greece.

The Marshall Plan would serve a two-fold purpose: first, provide a material basis that would disabuse Europeans of the promise of communism; second, force the Soviet Union to either accept American aid, thus tacitly admitting the strengths of the capitalist system—or throw up its “own wall” and thus justifying the creation and existence of a Western bloc.

The Marshall Plan creayed an economic miracle in Western Europe ; moreover, it forced Stalin into the incredibly clumsy position of nearly accepting American aid.

The US, for its part, was fearful that a unified Germany would fall into Moscow’s orbit, and thus opposed German unification. Instead, it favored the incorporation of a united Western German political unit into a broader Western defensive alliance.

On March 17, 1948, in response to the Czech coup, Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed a mutual defense pact called the Treaty of Brussels, also known as The Brussels Pact.

On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in Washington by Canada, the US, the Brussels Pact powers –namely Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands-, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal.

The main purpose was to facilitate the economic development of the eastern bloc, the group’s original members included the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Politburo introduced a collective leadership system so that absolute power was no longer exercised by one person.

The creation of the Baghdad Pact was another significant development in the institutionalization of the Cold War insofar as it extended the goal of militarily containing the Soviet Union far into the Middle East.

Established in 1955 after an agreement between Turkey and Iraq, it also included Britain, Pakistan, and Iran. As a rule, the general purpose of this pact was to prevent the spread of communism into the Middle East and keep the Soviets away from vital Middle East oil.

Despite tensions in the Middle East, there had been a brief thaw in relations between the superpowers in the second half of the 1950s, created mostly in wake of the Geneva Summit of 1955 and that of Paris in 1960. However, this abruptly came to an end in 1960?

The spread of communism in Africa and Latin America; the US’s unsuccessful military war in Vietnam; the failure of arms reduction talks; oil shocks; the Iranian Revolution of 1979 seemed to increase the visibility and power of the Soviet Union.