fight it out, but into a cold war. A cold war meant the two superpowers were openly hostile and trying to thwart each other, but stopping short of fighting on the battlefield.

This created a bipolar structure in the world in which the vast majority of countries had to pick sides. You were either in the Soviet camp or the U.S. camp. It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to straddle both.

Both countries worked to get contested regions, such as the newly liberated countries in Africa, on their side. Both nations were willing to go to great lengths, even proxy wars, such as in Korea and Vietnam, to spread their form of government and economic system.

John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address is a masterwork of cold war rhetoric as he used it to woo undecided nations into the US camp with promises of freedom, including the safeguarding of religious faith, and economic prosperity. The USSR likewise wooed the same countries with promises to end the class system, racism, and economic oppression most of them had suffered under during colonialism.

This bipolar structure of two rival superpowers fighting to be the dominant power in world politics lasted for the first 45 years after the end of World War II and defined global politics during that period, until Soviet power collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Cold War was focused around the a division between democratic, capitalistic nations (ultimately led by the United States) and the communist states under the Soviet Union. This division had roots in the ending of World War II. When you look at the creation of the Iron Curtain, for example, you would see that the division between democratic Western Europe and communist Eastern Europe was based in which countries had been liberated by the forces sweeping through from the West and which countries had been liberated by the Soviets coming through from the East.

That was the basic division and structure of the war. At the same time, be aware that both sides were ultimately seeking to the expand their zones of influence and to check the expansion of the rival zone.

Finally, I do want to note, there are points where this bipolarization does break down. One of the clearest examples of this is with communist China, which became a rival to the Soviet Union as well.

The Cold War was the most clear-cut case of bipolarity in modern history.  Polarity, in international relations, refers to the number of states or groups of states that have important amounts of power in the international arena.  During the Cold War, there were two clear blocs of states with obvious leaders.  These were the democratic countries, with the United States as their acknowledged leader, and the communist countries, almost all of which were really satellite states of the Soviet Union.  Although some other countries tried to make themselves relevant as the nonaligned movement, they never had enough power to make themselves an important “pole” in the international system.  This was most definitely an era of bipolarity in the world.

Because the world was bipolar and because the blocs’ leaders exerted so much power, this was a time when the structure of international relations was somewhat less anarchic than it usually is.  Both the United States and the Soviet Union were able to exert a great deal of power over their allies/clients.  This meant that there were two centers of power that could create a fair amount of stability within their respective spheres of influence.  The Cold War, then, was a highly bipolar era in international relations with two blocs whose leaders were able to maintain a high level of order among their allies and clients.