What was the Cold War about?
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Immediately after WWII ended, the dominant ideology in the world was the US ideology of self determination. The basic idea was that every country would have its own, democratically elected government and disputes would be solved through the UN. Given America’s political, economic, and military power immediately after the war, it was able to get everyone to agree to that view of the world – at least on paper.
Shortly after the UN was set up, the Soviet Union was still in control of large parts of Europe and Asia that had formerly been occupied by Germany and Japan. It was suppose to peacefully leave those areas under its occupation so that democratic elections could be held, but that’s not what happened.
What happened was that the Soviets began a massive purge, similar in scale to the holocaust. German and Japanese prisoners of war were sent to labor camps where they were worked to death, while anyone deemed to be anti-communist in Soviet controlled suffered similar fates. The Soviet Union then installed pro-Soviet puppet governments everywhere they were in power and took steps to ensure that Mao Zedong took control of China.
The Soviet Union also adopted an official foreign policy of supporting communist insurgent groups all over the world with the explicit aim of overthrowing democratic governments and installing pro-Soviet puppet states.
As to Europe and the US, the Soviet’s official foreign policy was that they would invade Western Europe as soon as doing so was feasible, and they began a massive military buildup for that express purpose.
Following this, the French and English refused to decolonize their African and Asian colonies, as they had *sort of kind of* agreed to do during WWII, citing the fact that all of the indigenous decolonization movements had ties to the Soviet Union.
The US response to this was to shift its foreign policy to one aimed at supporting governments that opposed Soviet backed guerillas, regardless of the democratic leanings of those governments.
And that’s basically the history of the Cold War – the Soviet Union slowly converted its economy until most of the economic activity inside of it was aimed at supplying weapons to anti-western guerillas in the third world and propping up its various puppet states. The US was able to successfully resist the Soviet attempts to take control of the third world without destroying its own economy, and the Soviet economy eventually fell apart, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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