The tangible spirit of optimism which accompanied Wilson's accession to power rested in part on the promise of improvement in East-West relations. Unlike Attlee, Churchill or Macmillan, Wilson faced a situation in which Cold War tensions had eased, and the risk of a major international crisis, let alone a global war, had diminished considerably. None the less the state of rivalry between the superpowers and their respective rivals had not vanished completely. In order to appreciate the impact of East-West politics on the Labour government which took office in October 1964, it is necessary to survey how the Cold War shaped the conduct of British external policy under Wilson's predecessors. The first two decades of the Cold War were characterised by intense East-West competition, punctuated by the crises over Berlin (1948–9, 1958–61), Korea (1950–3), Indochina (1954), Taiwan (1955, 1958) and Cuba (1962). These crises shaped Western adversarial perceptions of the Soviet bloc and China, and had a similar effect on how the Soviet and Chinese leaderships assessed the intentions of the ‘imperialist’ powers which confronted them. However, the confrontations over Berlin, the Cuba and East Asian ‘flashpoints’ were West-West as well as East- West in nature, and often involved disputes between the UK and its allies over how to respond to policy decisions initiated by Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao and other Communist leaders. This was particularly evident as far as relations between the USA and Britain were concerned.