The Cold War
The Cold War was the open yet restricted rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies that shaped international politics from the end of World War II until 1991. It was fought on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, with only limited recourse to weapons: the Berlin blockade and airlift, the Marshall Plan, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the nuclear arms race, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, détente and its collapse, and finally the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that allowed the Berlin Wall to fall in 1989 and the Soviet Union to dissolve in 1991.