March 5th, 1946 – Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech

March 12th, 1947 – Truman Doctrine

Fearing the expansion of Soviet power, Truman passed the signature American initiative of the
Cold War – the Truman Doctrine, which sought to contain Soviet influence in Greece and Turkey
by sending U.S. financial and military aid.
This policy of active intervention (i.e. " in the domestic affairs of nations important to U.S. national
security interests later was extended all across Europe and in the Middle East.
April 3rd, 1948 – Marshall Plan
An American bipartisan effort conceived by the State Department that loaned over 13 billion
dollars to Western European nations to facilitate reconstruction efforts after the World War II. The
economic effectiveness of the Marshall Plan is debated, but it undoubtedly strengthened U.S.-
European diplomatic ties while alienating countries in the eastern bloc, where Soviet troops
blocked benefits to Hungary and Poland. The lines of the Cold War were drawn.
June 24th, 1948 – May 12th, 1949 – Berlin Blockade / Berlin Airlift
The Yalta Conference negotiated after World War II agreed to divide Germany into various
occupation zones. Berlin, a Western territory, was located deep within a Russian occupation zone.
After Western-Soviet relations deteriorated further and further, amid accusations that the Allies
had violated the Potsdam Agreement signed at the Yalta Conference, the U.S. announced that
Germany would be divided into East Germany and West Germany. Because Berlin, the capital,
was in East Germany (Soviet territory), the Soviets initiated a blockade on U.S. supplies entering
by train into the city. However, for over a year, Americans continued to provide West Berliners
with airlifts containing 2.3 million tons total of essential provisions before finally the Soviets
acknowledged that the blockade had failed and reopened the borders. Finally, the dispute was
resolved when East and West Germany were established as separate republics – the first
confrontation of the Cold War had concluded.
April 4th, 1949 – Creation of NATO
11 Western European nations and the United States joined together against the Soviet Union in a
military alliance guaranteeing (in Article 5 of the NATO agreement) that any attack on one of its
members would be interpreted as an attack against all of them. NATO is a quintessential example
of the military posturing and hard-line diplomacy that characterized geopolitics during the Cold
War .
October 1st, 1949 – Mao Zedong’s takeover of China
Although the U.S. understood that the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt, ineffective regime was
inevitable, officials were nonetheless nonplussed when Mao Zedong, a hard-core Communist
revolutionary, seized power and further expanded the Soviets’ diplomatic and economic sphere of
influence. Thus, the U.S. refused to recognize Mao Zedong as the leader of China, setting the stage
for international tension in Southeast Asia that would erupt with the Korean War.
June 25th, 1950 – June 27th, 1953 – Korean War
After the fall of the Japanese empire after World War II, the Soviets and the Americans divided
governance of Korea into two sectors: North Korea, a Communist dictatorship backed by the
USSR, and South Korea, an anti-communist dictator backed by the US. Although the 38th parallel
was agreed upon as the delineating boundary, there was constant border skirmishes that eventually
exploded into all-out war on June 25th, 1950, when 75,000 North Korean troops mounted an
invasion of the South. Because the U.S. did not want to lose face, lest they encourage the USSR
to become even more aggressive, millions of troops were committed to secure South Korea’s
sovereignty. Ultimately, a tense stalemate emerged in which no formal peace was established, but
a demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel and an armistice were negotiated. This conflict established
China as a key international player by demonstrating the new Communist nation’s military might
and willingness to flex its might within its sphere of influence. Moreover, this first example of
indirect military conflict between the U.S. and Communist countries further deepened the
capitalist/communist divide – through proxy wars, superpowers would come to fight their
ideological battles through smaller microcosmic conflicts.
March 13th, 1954 – May 7th, 1954 – Dien Bien Phu
Due to massive military blunders on part of the French, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the
conclusive battle of the First Indochina war between the Viet Minh local revolutionary forces and
the France. Following France’s pull-out of this conflict, the international powers that signed the
1954 Geneva accords marking the 17th parallel as the division between North Vietnam, controlled
by the communist rebels, and South Vietnam, a democracy backed by the U.S.
When Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-favored president of South Vietnam, refused to back down, the
CIA worked with local dissenters to assassinate him, leading to the devolution of the region into
chaos and the subsequent start of the Vietnam War.
July 21st, 1954 – Geneva Accords (Vietnam War)
The agreements derived from the 1954 Geneva Conference, which established a demilitarized zone
at the 17th Parallel dividing Vietnam into two and an International Control Commission that would
enforce the ceasefire. The Vietnamese were disappointed by their thwarted ambitions for
unification, but they were secretly relieved that further U.S. intervention (such as forced regime
change) did not occur, as had happened in Korea. President Eisenhower expressed satisfaction that
peace was obtained, but firmly maintained that since the U.S. was not party to the treaty, it was
not liable to its conditions.
May 14th, 1955 – Creation of the Warsaw Pact
To counter the U.S.-led NATO coalition, the U.S.S.R. and its various satellite states in Central and
Eastern Europe founded their own military alliance called the Warsaw Pact.
Although the nations of the Pact never directly fought with NATO, the organization served as a
significant counterweight to NATO influence in Europe, symbolizing the Soviet domination of
Eastern Europe and deterring the U.S. from attempting to intervene in the affairs of East Germany.
November 1st, 1955 – April 30th, 1975 – Vietnam War
U.S.-backed President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam’s policy of election rigging, corruption
and suppression of dissent had led to the formation of a homegrown anti-Diem movement called
the National Liberation Front, which was financially and logistically supported by the Northern
Vietnamese Viet Minh communist government. Motivated primarily by the “domino theory” – the
idea that if a single state fell to Communism, more and more nations would convert as well –
President Eisenhower committed American troops to help the South Vietnamese government fight
off both the National Liberation Front and the Northern Vietnamese army. In response, China and
Russia sent weapons, supplies and advisors to aid North Vietnam, which increased both the
financial cost and humanitarian impact of the conflict.
Finally, after almost 20 years public outrage over the nearly sixty thousand American troops,
hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of civilian lives lost in the Vietnam War, the U.S.
pulled out. Two years later, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam, marking a Soviet/Chinese
victory and a U.S. defeat. The debate over the Vietnam war had significant domestic consequences
– it polarized the American electorate over the value of such extreme military interventionism and
massively unbalanced the U.S. federal budget due to war expenses. However, even more
importantly, it forced the U.S. to shift in its Cold War foreign policy strategy – rather than using
brute military force, the U.S. began to focus more on diplomacy and negotiation. Such large-scale
American military intervention would never again be seen during the Cold War.
February 25th, 1956 – October 1964 – De-Stalinization
After Nikita Khruschev, Stalin’s successor, rose to power in 1953, he silently and slowly began
renaming buildings/locations named after Stalin, improving prison conditions, and initiating
judicial reform. However, De-Stalinization formally began during Khruschev’s speech at the 20th
Communist Party Congress, in which he denounced Stalin as brutal and immoral, and openly
launched his reforms to liberalize the Soviet political system.
The process is credited for beginning the “cooling” of the Cold War after the Vietnam conflict,
making way for the Perestroika and Glasnost reforms under Gorbachev, which ultimately
concluded in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Nonetheless,
tensions persisted and flared occasionally during the later years in the Cuban Missile Crisis – De-
stalinization was by no means a comprehensive reduction in Cold War tension.
October 4th, 1957 – Sputnik Launched
Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was launched by the U.S.S.R. to defeat the U.S., who
was planning to launch its own satellite called Explorer I.
This monumental achievement marked the start of the Space Race between the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R., in which both countries sought to outdo one another’s scientific precedents in outer space
travel. The U.S.S.R.’s success in space technology stoked both fear and competitiveness in the
public, who sought an expanded U.S. space program (i.e. the founding of N.A.S.A.) to both prevent
advanced Soviet space missile technology from threatening national security and the soft-
power/credibility boost that being on modern tech’s cutting edge would grant America.
February 16th, 1959 – Fidel Castro becomes leader of Cuba (Prime Minister Inauguration)
Fulgencio Batista, a former Cuban general had overthrown the democratically elected government
of Cuba and instituted tyranny, eliminating democratic processes, facilitating rampant corruption
and widening economic inequality. However, because of his anti-Communist leanings, his rise was
backed by the U.S. Nonetheless, public anger prevailed over institutional power, and Cuban
lawyer-turned-revolutionary Fidel Castro won a guerilla war against Batista, establishing a
Communist government just 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
Castro’s inauguration bred fear in Washington that Communist influence in Cuba would disrupt
the U.S. sphere of power, leading to plans for military invasion of Cuba as well as a trade embargo
in an attempt to starve the newly founded nation and reinstitute a capitalist government subservient
to U.S. interests. Moreover, Communism in Cuba drove an intense diplomatic wedge between the
U.S. and the small island, setting the stage for tense confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis,
in which the Cold War’s ambient threat of nuclear attack or miscalculation lurched into the
foreground of international politics.
May 1st, 1960 – U-2 Spy Incident
The U.S. government had been conducting aerial spying on the U.S.S.R. for several years before
a U.S. U-2 spy plane was shot down for violating Soviet airspace. Its pilot, Francis Gary Powers,
was captured by Soviet forces.
Consequently, President Eisenhower was forced to admit the truth about the spy missions, raising
mutual suspicion and diplomatic hostility and disrupting the Paris summit of 1960, in which
Khruschev ranted publicly about U.S. dishonesty and cowardice. Even after Powers returned to
the U.S. in a prisoner exchange between the two nations, tensions ran high and the prospect of
peace was extremely distant.
August 13th, 1961 – Construction of the Berlin Wall
For many years, East Berliners seeking democracy and capitalism fled to West Berlin, which was
controlled by the U.S. To prevent this, the U.S.S.R. constructed a wall with mines, guards and
floodlights to prevent unauthorized crossings. Although U.S. officials contemplated bulldozing
sections of the wall, the presence of Soviet troops and the lessons learned from the Vietnam War
about unnecessary foreign military intervention led the U.S. to simply accept the division between
East and West Berlin.
This wall represented the metaphorical and literal divide between the Americans and the Soviets
– both nations pursued hard-line policies viewing the international politics as a series of zero-sum
power play between the two countries.
October 15th, 1962 – October 28th, 1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis
Following a series of failed assassination attempts and the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba, Fidel Castro felt extremely threatened and wanted to ensure his sovereignty by boosting
his military capabilities. After reaching out to the Soviet Union for help, Castro received a
shipment of nuclear missiles, which were discovered by U.S. intelligence and reported to President
Kennedy.
After thirteen days of negotiations, finally Kennedy and Khruschev came to the agreement that the
U.S. would withdraw its missiles in Italy and Turkey if the U.S.S.R. withdrew its missiles from
Cuba. Moreover, both sides would ban aboveground nuclear missile testing. This state of
demilitarization greatly reduced fears of nuclear attack on both sides, marking an unprecedented
peaceful dispute resolution between the two hostile nations.
January 5th, 1968 – August 21st, 1968 – Prague Spring
After Alexander Dubcek obtained control of the Communist Party in Czechoslovkia, a Soviet
satellite state, he instituted large-scale liberal reforms, such as freedom of the press, rehabilitation
programs for political prisoners, legal protection of civil liberties and autonomy for the Slovakian
people. However, after Warsaw Pact troops invaded the nation in August, strict totalitarian
Communism was reinstituted. This harsh repression startled nations in both the Eastern and
Western blocs, leading the U.S. to condemn the Soviets’ actions but refrain from substantive
intervention and establishing the principles guiding the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that any
attempts at liberalization or Western cooption in Soviet satellite nations would be shut down at
any cost, further solidifying partisan boundaries and strengthening internal cohesion within the
Eastern bloc.
September 26th, 1968 – May 29th, 1972 – Brezhnev Doctrine
A Soviet foreign policy doctrine that obligated all Communist nations in the Warsaw Pact (whose
troops were used in the invasion of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring) to reinstitute
Communism if any deviation from Soviet principles occurred.
Consequently, no nation in the Eastern bloc was allowed to deviate from strict Communism –
moreover, because the U.S.S.R. could rationalize any military intervention using this broad statute,
the Brezhnev doctrine was used to justifying the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ten years later,
even after it was renounced in 1972.
January 20th, 1969 – December 25th, 1979 – Détente
Détente, a French word for cessation of tension, was a period of improved relations between the
U.S. and the U.S.S.R. During this time, arms reduction agreements like the Nuclear Non-
proliferation Treaty of 1968 and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks brought consensual certainty
to a previously fear-filled international atmosphere. Moreover, the Helsinki Final Act solidified
political boundaries and created opportunities for international economic and cultural integration.
Despite the initial progress during the Détente period, gradually, after the two nations’ failure to
ratify the terms of the SALT II talks, there was a gradual reversal of the progress towards peace
culminating in the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan, which reopened old wounds and drastically
damaged U.S.-Soviet relations.
May 26th, 1972 – SALT I
Given Soviet expansion in the field of Inter-continental Ballistic Missile technology, the U.S. felt
more and more insecure about the possibility of nuclear attack; thus, President initiated discussion
about nuclear arms reduction with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin that continued with Nixon.
The monumental AMB Treaty limited missile production and missile defense sites on both sides,
securing a temporary retardation of the arms race and improving transparency in communication
between the two nations – this policy manifested the archetypal policy of the Détente period.
December 25th, 1979 – February 15th, 1989 – Russian Invasion of Afghanistan
In April of 1978, the Centrist government of Afghanistan was overthrown by a Communist-led
military coup. Incredibly unpopular, the new government maintained close ties with the Soviets
and instituted domestic repression to solidify its power. As a result, domestic rebellion (the
mujahideen) formed as an Islamic, anticommunist reaction to the leftist authorities. To restore the
Communist government, the Soviets invaded and propped up their favored leadership, but the U.S.
continued to back the rebellion guerilla forces until a stalemate formed and the Soviets were forced
to withdraw.
The failed invasion saw Afghanistan returned to an state unaffiliated with either side of the Cold
War – however, the division and power vacuum left by the conflict caused the Taliban, a radical
Islamist group, to seize power and provide terrorists like Osama bin Laden a platform from which
to operate in the long-term.
September 17th, 1980 – Solidarity
In response to bureaucratic inefficiency and economic crisis, secret labor unions were formed
during the 1970s in opposition to the government. The Solidarity labor union, a non-communist
amalgamation of existing workers’ organizations, used a combination of civic participation and
non-violent protest tactics like strikes to overcome Soviet repression and oust Communist
influence with financial aid from the C.I.A. Solidarity’s unprecedented successful rebellion against
the U.S.S.R.’s values in Poland, a Soviet satellite state, prompted the spread of peaceful anti-
Communist movements across Central and Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet
sphere of influence.
March 23rd, 1983 – Strategic Defense Initiative
A missile defense system proposed by President Ronald Reagan that he claimed would render
nuclear weapons obsolete. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization was later founded to
innovate such a defense system, but failed to do so within the timespan of the Cold War.
Critics said this system would destabilize the Mutually-Assured Destruction that deterred nuclear
attack from either side of the Cold War – even though it was never completed during the Cold War
period, the SDI increased Soviet fears of American nuclear attack and contributed to growing
tension between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Reagan presidency’s destabilization of the
fragile peace already disrupted by the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Afghanistan.
March 11th, 1985 – Glasnost
A policy of openness and transparency adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisors during the
Cold War that encouraged public criticism of authorities and represented basic first steps towards
guaranteeing the civil liberties granted in liberal democracies like the U.S.
Glasnost caused issues that were previously covered up by the state media like poverty, corruption
and ethnic tension to rise to the surface, culminating in increased nationalism in Soviet satellite
states leading to the fracturing of the Soviet Union as well as increasing public adoption of Western
popular culture due to greater international interaction with the U.S.S.R.
December 8th, 1987 – 1987 INF Treaty
Modernization of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and deployment devices in both the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R. led to concerns about the national security of both the Soviet Union and Western
nations under the U.S.’s “nuclear umbrella” of protection, who were within striking range of these
new missiles.
Consequently, both sides agreed to cap the production of these missiles and destroy many devices
already produced. The terms of this treaty set the foundations for future arms reduction treaties –
features like short-term inspections and mutually accessible photo reconnaissance satellites
boosted transparency between the two nations and cooled down the Cold War.
November 9th, 1989 – Fall of the Berlin Wall
Thanks to improving U.S.-Soviet relations, the East German Communist Party allowed the free
travel of West and East Berliners through the wall, engaging in the first steps towards German
reunification and bringing the Cold War to a close. People brought hammers and pickaxes to chip
away at the wall while bulldozers and cranes hired by the state rapidly destroyed it.
This fall of the Berlin wall is symbolic of the reduction in tension between the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. thanks to diplomatic efforts on both sides and Soviet reforms like Glasnost that integrated
the Russian people into the liberal international community.
December 26th, 1991 – Collapse of the Soviet Union
Gorbachev’s liberal reforms led to reduced Communist political control and increased political
fracturing, culminating in the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. altogether when Gorbachev stepped down
and Boris Yeltsin seized the reins of Russia, a new democracy among the many others that had
formed due to the break-up of the U.S.SR.
The Soviet Union’s Collapse brought a final resolution to the Cold War: the U.S. had won.
Although it seemed (at the time) that liberal democracy would spread throughout Eastern Europe,
the economic catastrophe during the Yeltsin years led to the rise of Vladimir Putin, who restored
centralized state control of society but still preserved many Western-influenced economic and
political reforms, such as (at least the illusion of) democracy and the free market.