ABSTRACT
In light of postwar situation, it is hardly surprising that a dominant feature of the following decades was the tense, ideologically driven struggle known as the Cold War, which affected politics, economic development, and social stability around the globe. The two systems of capitalism and communism contained ideologically opposed visions of what the postwar world should look like. Soviet-American difficulties did not yet dim the optimism felt by many that a better world could be rebuilt on the ashes of the old one. As the Cold War stretched across the globe, the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves entangled in, and often complicating, local problems that had little to do with superpower security, communism. Truman accepted Kennan's containment concept, which remained the foundation of American Cold War policy until the conflict itself ended in 1989. The Cold War only hindered the modernization process for less developed nations, from Asia to the Middle East to Africa and Latin America.
