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Article: Cold War Origins
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- Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy
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Cold War Origins
Anders Stephanson
Since the astonishing disintegration of its empire in eastern Europe in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself, "Cold War" has widely come to designate the entire postwar period in international re
lations from 1945 onward, during which the tense relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union formed the pivot of world politics. The end of one side, then, evidently ended the relationship as such and thus the period as well. This is not, however, precisely the way in which the term emerged or was always understood and used. The "end" of the Cold War was declared on a number of earlier occasions, perhaps no more ...