The late 1940s marked the origin of what the journalist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann called, in 1947, the “Cold War,” denoting the emerging confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The term remained in use as a shorthand description of Soviet-American relations and an explanation of most of American foreign policy until 1989 or 1990. Culminating in the reunification of Germany, the events of those two years signaled the Soviet Union’s surrender of much of what it had struggled to achieve, allowing the United States to proclaim itself the victor – and requiring American leaders to find a new rationale for the use and abuse of American wealth and power.

World War II ended in the summer of 1945, and the Korean War began in the summer of 1950. The United States and the Soviet Union spent much of the intervening five years defining their post-war relationship. Each nation pursued its vision of world order, exploring the possibilities of cooperation in achieving its goals, and testing the limits of the other’s tolerance in pursuit of unshared goals. Each exploited the extraordinary opportunity to extend its influence in the vacuum created by the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of British power. Each found important allies, although much of the rest of the world proved less malleable than leaders in Washington and Moscow had imagined. They succeeded, nonetheless, in achieving most of their principal objectives, including a rough settlement of the major issues that divided them, and they provided for themselves whatever might pass for security in a world over which hung the shadow of nuclear holocaust.