Who were the political figures involved in the Cold War?

The Cold War dominated world politics from about 1947 until about 1991.  This means that practically every important figure in world politics during this time was in some way involved in the Cold War.  In this answer, I will list some of the most important figures of the Cold War era.

We can start by mentioning every US president who served during this time.  This would include Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.  All of these men were very important in the Cold War.  Other important American leaders of the era were George Marshall, who proposed the Marshall Plan, John Foster Dulles, who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and Henry Kissinger, who was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for Nixon and Ford.

We can then list leaders of the Soviet Union.  These included Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Of these men, Andropov and Chernenko are less important because they were not in power for very long.

Although the US and the USSR were the most important countries in the Cold War, there were important leaders from other countries as well.  A list of these leaders could include

•         Mao Zedong, leader of communist China
•         Kim Il-Sung, leader of North Korea during the Korean War
•         Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietnamese communists
•         Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egyptian leader who tried to play the superpowers off against one another.
•         Charles de Gaulle, who pulled France out of NATO and tried to be independent of US power
•         Fidel Castro leader of communist Cuba
•         Marshal Tito, who tried to have Yugoslavia be communist, but independent of Moscow

There are many other people who could be included on this list.  We could talk about Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Syngman Rhee, Ngo Dinh Diem, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Jonas Savimbi, and many others.  As I said, anyone who was at all important in world politics during this time was involved in the Cold War in some way. 

Who was involved in the Cold War?

A better question would probably be: "Who was not involved in the Cold War?" Such was the global impact of the Cold War that almost every continent was embroiled in it. The Cold War was an ideological conflict between democratic-capitalist nations with those that were autocratic-socialist nations. The conflict was waged on the continents of Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa from the end of World War II until the late 1980's.

The two countries that took the lead in the Cold War were given the moniker superpowers. The United States led an alliance of capitalist nations that formed what was called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The treaty was forged in 1949 with the most prominent founders being the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The Soviet Union spearheaded an alliance of communist or socialist countries in this conflict. In response to NATO, the Soviet Union signed the Warsaw Pact with countries like East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

As mentioned earlier, the Cold War was fought on many continents. Some of the countries involved in conflicts or civil wars because of the Cold War included Cuba, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, and China. The attached map demonstrates the scale and reach of the Cold War.

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Who were the main figures in the Cold War?

The Cold War lasted for more than four decades, so there were multiple players, but any Cold War discussion would be incomplete if it didn't include at least the following individuals:

• Nikita Krushchev — Krushchev was the premier of the Soviet Union from 1958-1964. His major contribution to the escalation of the Cold War might be his role in the provocation of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

• John F. Kennedy — U.S. President Kennedy was responsible for the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba in 1961, which was not effective. However, his role in avoiding conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis has helped overshadow the failure of the Bay of Pigs attack.

• Fidel Castro — As prime minister of Cuba, Castro was intimately involved in the happenings associated with both the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• Mikhail Gorbachev — As General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika (economic and political reform) and glasnost (openness) helped bring a thaw to the Cold War. 

• Ronald Reagan — U.S. President Reagan's Cold War policies weakened the potential advancement of Soviet communism and promoted the spread of democracy and liberty.

Who were the main participants in the Cold War and why?

This is something of a difficult question to answer because there are many ways to answer it.

First, we could say that the Cold War involved the United States and the Soviet Union.  These were the two superpowers in the world during the Cold War and they were the main players in the Cold War.  The Soviet Union was trying to spread communism and the US was trying to prevent that spread and to promote democracy and capitalism. 

Second, we could say that the US, the USSR, and a few other countries were mainly involved in the Cold War.  These other countries could include China, the two Koreas, the two Vietnams (there were two up until 1975), and a few others.  These are the countries that were most affected by the Cold War.  There were wars fought in Korea and Vietnam.  The Chinese participated to some degree in both of those wars.  Therefore, countries like this were involved as well.

Finally, we could say that essentially every country in the world was involved in the Cold War.  The Cold War dominated the world scene to the extent that all countries had to take sides in some way.  All of them were affected by the competition between the two superpowers.

Thus, we can answer this question in a number of ways, depending on how we define “involved.” 

What was the Cold War, and why did it occur?

The Cold War was a period of confrontation and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It started at the end of World War II. The United States and the Soviet Union had different economic and political systems. The Soviet Union wanted to spread the Communist system around the world, and we wanted to prevent that from happening.

At the end of World War II, there were several things that led to conflict. In Poland, there were supposed to be free elections to determine the new government. Some members from the prewar government were supposed to be in the new government. The vast majority of people in the new government were members of the government installed by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. There didn’t appear to be free elections.

The King of Romania said he was pressured to have a communist government. This violated the Declaration of Liberated Europe that was supposed to allow people to choose their own government.

There were also issues in Germany. We believed the Soviet Union was trying to weaken the non-communist zone. As a result, we merged the zones controlled by the United States, Britain, and France into the non-communist country of West Germany. In 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded all land routes into West Berlin. This led to Berlin Blockade.

The Soviet Union tried to spread communism to Greece, Turkey, and North Korea. We opposed the spread of communism because we believed if communism could be contained, the system would eventually fail. Thus, we gave aid to non-communist countries to try to keep them from becoming communist. The Cold War continued until communism basically ended in most places around 1990.