ABSTRACT
In 1945 the United States possessed a level of immense power that would have been unimaginable at its founding. Unlike earlier decades of the twentieth century, when its corporations and government agencies focused their efforts on Latin America and the Pacific, the victory over Nazi Germany and ultranationalist Japan in 1945 enabled the United States to exercise its power throughout the globe. The United States faced the twin tasks of rebuilding Western Europe and Japan, and confronting an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. By the late 1940s the tension between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). erupted into the Cold War.
