shored up Turkey and Greece against Moscow's pressure; the Marshall Plan provided economic aid to war-devastated Europe. Moscow tried to cut West Berlin off from the West in 1948-49, but the Berlin Airlift maintained the enclave. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up.

Asia became a "hot" war in the struggle between East and West. In 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist Chinese armies conquered the Chinese mainland. Then Mao sent his victorious troops into the bloody Korean War (1950–1953), which ended in stalemate. The US constructed alliance systems in Asia, too. America's participation in the Vietnam War (1965–1973) ended in failure.

The Cold War extended to the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. In the Middle East, America and Russia supported opposing sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Cuban Missile Crisis almost touched off nuclear war.

America claimed "victory" in the Cold War as the Soviet Union's sphere-of-influence and territories disintegrated in 1989-1991.

The Cold War forced countries outside of the United States and the Soviet Union to choose sides, whether they wanted to or not, and gave both superpowers an excuse to meddle in the affairs of sovereign nations. The Soviet Union, for example, felt it had to keep an iron grip on the Warsaw Pact nations to its west. It hoped to install sympathetic communist governments, fearing the capitalist countries in the West would try to invade. The U.S.S.R. erected a metaphoric "iron curtain" between its satellite countries, such as Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia,and Czechoslovakia, and western nations, so that travel between the two zones was difficult. When countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to loosen the grip, the U.S.S.R. sent in tanks. In Berlin, the Soviet Union erected a wall to keep Germans in East Germany. Meanwhile, the United States organized its allies into NATO, with mutual promises of protection backed by American military might. While the Soviets worried that the West would invade, the West feared the worldwide spread of communism.

Fearing the "domino effect" in which countries would one by one be turned communist, the United States asserted itself in Asia, engaging in open warfare against both North Korea and North Vietnam. It also interfered in the internal politics of African nations, fearing the spread of communism on that continent. In one instance when President Lumumba in the Belgian Congo asked for Soviet help against nationalist factions, the West got involved in what has been described as a "proxy" war between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. In South America, which the United States considered a sphere of influence, the United States was quick to train and back anti-communist forces and leaders. Whether or not the smaller nations across the globe who were used as pawns in the struggle between the superpowers would have fared better or worse without Cold War interference, there is no doubt the Cold War has had a profound effect on the entire world. 

The main antagonists in the Cold War were the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the Cold War ended up affecting practically every country in the world in some way.

Some countries were affected by having wars erupt within them.  The three biggest examples of this were Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan.  In each of these wars, indigenous communists fought indigenous non-communists.  In each case, both sides had help from other countries that were on their side.  In each case, the countries were badly impacted by the fighting. 

In other countries, the impacts were more positive.  The US and the USSR would compete with one another to help countries that were not firmly aligned in one camp or the other.  They would often give economic aid to countries to help persuade those countries to take their side.  This meant that some countries benefitted from the Cold War in economic terms.

Finally, we can say that all countries were affected by the Cold War because the Cold War shaped the international order.  All countries had to worry about what would happen if nuclear war broke out between the two main powers.  By contrast, most countries also benefitted to some degree from the relative peace that typified the Cold War.  The US and USSR generally kept large wars from breaking out among other countries because it was in their interests to do so. 

Thus, the Cold War had a wide variety of impacts on various countries of the world. 

The Cold War was characterized primarily by the nuclear stand-off between the two reigning superpowers of the time, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union. While the presence in the arsenals of both countries of large-scale nuclear forces targeting each other's homeland helped to keep a lid on the confrontation in Europe, the less-developed regions of the world, or "Third World," became the more active scene of ongoing conflicts by proxies of both superpowers.  Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, guerrilla insurgencies and terrorist groups supported by the Soviet Union and its closest allies, namely East Germany and Czechoslovakia, waged war against pro-U.S. governments, while the United States supported anti-communist insurgencies in places like Nicaragua, Angola and Albania (the latter during the earlier phase of the Cold War).  The result was a great deal of political, economic and social instability that exacerbated underlying developmental problems like corruption and repression. An enduring legacy of those proxy wars, sadly, is the wide-scale problem of land mines that were sown across fields and forests by various parties to these conflicts and that continued to maim and kill innocent civilians long after the fighting had ceased. 

One of the problems of the Cold War's "spill-over" into the less-developed world was that human rights problems were given subordinate consideration to the governing regime's record on supporting or opposing the United States in its broader confrontation with the Soviet Union.  While there was no question that the autocratic and, frequently, totalitarian regimes allied with the Soviet Bloc maintained awful human rights practices against their own populations, the United States, especially in Central America, similarly prioritized geopolitical considerations above human rights, which fueled anti-government insurgencies in countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua (the latter witnessing the victory of its Marxist-Leninist insurgency, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and its imposition of a Soviet/Cuban-style totalitarian regime to replace the pro-U.S. dictatorship it overthrew). 

In conclusion, the Cold War allowed for the peaceful development of democratic governments in Western Europe, while pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe were ruthlessly crushed in places like Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.  It was in the desperately poor regions of the Third World, however, where the most sustained bloodshed occurred.

One of the most obvious legacies of the Cold War affecting us today, in my opinion, is the presence of large, radical Islamic groups, from the Taliban to al-Qaeda to ISIS. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, the US, in spite of the fact that the president at the time was the dovish Jimmy Carter, reacted as if this were a threat to world peace overall. The assumption, typical of Cold War thinking and the "domino theory," was that the Soviets would make Afghanistan a launching-base for further expansion, especially into the oil-rich Middle East, where things had already been thrown into disarray by the Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the Shah. Beginning with Carter and even more so during the following administration of Ronald Reagan, the US gave support to Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan in an effort to expel the Soviets. By 1989, the Soviets realized they were in a quagmire similar to what the US had experienced in Vietnam twenty years earlier. The Afghanistan war, and the effort to keep up with the arms race accelerated by Reagan, helped to bankrupt the Soviets. In 1989, they were no longer able to rein in the satellite European countries: Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, which broke away and established non-communist governments, while East and West Germany were re-united. By 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, with the constituent republics becoming independent, non-communist states: the Baltic countries, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the central Asian republics such as Kazakhstan and the others.

Though it's a bit simplistic to attribute all of this to the reflexive Cold War thinking by US administrations about Afghanistan, the real result of the failed Soviet venture was, as stated, the empowerment of Islamic groups which had been supported by the US: first the Taliban, then al-Qaeda, then ISIS, which is an outgrowth of al-Qaeda. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by radicals who had trained in the Afghanistan camps. This is not to say that continued Soviet control of Afghanistan would have been a good thing, or that the continuance of the Soviet Union would have been desirable. However, two things, apart from the establishment of Islamic radical groups, have also occurred, that are worth noting as aftereffects of the Cold War. First, the fall of communism, though at first welcomed by many Soviet citizens, resulted in an economic depression in the former Soviet countries in the 1990s. This, partly, led to the rise of an autocratic figure in Vladmir Putin, to whom the Russians looked up as one who would re-establish their former glory and power. And second, many in the US, ironically more in the Democratic party than the Republican, still have a reflexive anti-Russian stance. Putin is obviously a dictator presiding over a kleptocracy. But whatever his international ambitions and the degree of his power lust may be, Putin is regarded by the West in the same way as the communist leaders of the past who were feared as having the will, and possibly the power, to take over the world. And the Russians still react with hostility to the US, as we have seen in their attempts to use cyber attacks to influence internal politics in the US. All of these factors are part of the Cold War legacy.

The Cold War affected the world in a variety of ways, and the West in particular. The United States and Russia were forever changed as a result of tensions between the West and the Soviet Union. Although modern-day Russia and the United States now have peaceful relations, fear of nuclear war led to long-lasting tensions between governments and nations.

One of the most significant ways in which the Cold War affected the United States was the paranoia generated by fear that Russia would use a nuclear weapon. This fear led to the loss of numerous lives and a resurgence in international espionage. The United States also saw a resurgence in the incidence of "communist witch hunts" during the period of the Cold War, which led to undue suspicion and general mistreatment of anyone who was deemed to have ties, however tenuous, with the Soviet Union. The doctrine of containment forever changed United States foreign policy, fostering a sense of nationalism unlike any the country had ever seen before.

On the other hand, without the Cold War, it would have been impossible for the space program to develop as rapidly as it did. In fact, the "space race" led to a scientific renaissance in Russia and the United States, inspiring the formation of NASA. On a governmental level, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were formed as a direct reaction to the events of the Cold War. The Cold War also led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving the United States as the only remaining world superpower.

The Cold War was a trying period for the West and it permanently altered United States foreign policy. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Cold War is that it changed the way in which nations compete, shifting the focus from military competition to scientific advancements with military applications.

The Cold War was the event that shaped world history from the end of WWII to the early 1990's. The Cold War separated the world into two separate blocs: the bloc allied with the United States and the bloc allied with the Soviet Union. The nations allied with the United States used its economic assistance in order to improve their postwar economies. The Marshall Plan strengthened ties between the US and Western Europe.

Conversely, the Marshall Plan led to a dividing line between Western and Eastern Europe since the Soviet Union refused to take assistance from the United States. The Soviet Union never pulled its troops out of Eastern Europe at the end of WWII. They treated the region as a buffer zone between itself and the West, which it viewed as a threat. China would soon become a major player in the Cold War after it was taken over by communists after a long civil war. China would initially be a strong Soviet ally, but the two nations fell out of step; China did not take orders from the Kremlin and pursued its own agenda in Asia.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Cold War was its impact in the developing world. The developing world sought to end colonialism, and many leaders were willing to use the major players of the Cold War for financial and military backing.

The United States and China fought each other directly during the Korean War. In reality, this should have been a civil war to unite North and South Korea. The Soviet Union and the US sent advisers and equipment to North and South Vietnam respectively after the French left the country. The US fought Soviet-funded North Vietnamese fighters led by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist who desired an independent Vietnam long before the Cold War started. The US also sent advisers and material to Afghanistan in order to fight against Soviet aggression there—this move would backfire after the US pulled out and the country was overtaken by extremists.

The US backed regimes all over the world whose only positive characteristic was that they were against communism. This led to the US backing undemocratic regimes in Cuba, Iran, and Guatemala. In many circumstances, the US-backed regime was overthrown at a loss to international American prestige. The Cold War helped to create the postcolonial map of the world by providing the means and material for colonies to gain their independence. The Cold War also set the stage for the divide between Eastern and Western Europe, a divide that still has economic implications today. The Cold War has also led to a legacy of mistrust between the US, China, and Russia that still exists.