1990's Government and Politics | After the Cold War

End of the Cold War.

Political revolutions never just happen. Rather, they are part of processes that begin long before they are discernable by political scientists or historians. Cold War ideological and military competition began in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II. The Soviet Union had driven the Nazis out of Soviet territory, across Eastern Europe, and back into Germany. After the war the Soviets insisted on establishing friendly governments in all Eastern European nations occupied by its forces; they also subverted other governments and formed a Soviet empire stretching from the western sectors of Germany across Europe and Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Communist revolutions in China (1949) and Cuba (1959) seemingly added to their empire, at least as it was perceived in the West. From 1945 to 1989 there was constant ideological competition between the United States and the U.S.S.R. for allies. That struggle was especially...