9 - America and the World, 1945–1991

Summary

This chapter reviews the era that began in the closing months of World War II and ended with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. In 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States, allied in the war against the Axis powers, crushed their enemies and emerged from the war triumphant. Ideologically, anticommunism was the engine that drove American action, just as hostility to what they perceived as capitalist imperialism energized Soviet leaders, few of whom still dreamed of a socialist Utopia. Without the American determination to provide world leadership, it is difficult to conceive of a Cold War. After the Berlin blockade, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were clearly adversarial. And yet the two countries were not quite enemies. The United States in the 1990s was a land very different from what older Americans remembered of 1945. The lot of minorities, Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and of women was greatly improved.