The End of the Cold War

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who devised American Cold War policy, failed to find a way to end the conflict with the Soviet Union. Subsequent presidents would also struggle to resist communism and to find a way to end the Cold War.

After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, during which the U.S. and USSR came very close to an actual nuclear war, American presidents became more committed to reducing the potentially deadly arms race and finding some way to coexist with the USSR. But the U.S. government remained opposed to the spread of communism, which led to the war in Vietnam.

In the 1970s, Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford practiced a policy of detente, (a French word for a relaxation of tension). In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan rejected detente, calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire," and spent more money to build up the American military.

Meanwhile, as George Kennan had predicted in the 1940s, the USSR was crumbling from within. Beginning in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), which reduced the secrecy and power of the Soviet government and also reduced Soviet military expenditures. In 1989, the USSR ended its domination of Eastern Europe, and in 1991, ceased to exist. With the USSR's end, the Cold War, one of the most costly (by some estimates, more than 8 trillion dollars were spent on arms worldwide between 1945 and 1996), dangerous, and influential eras in history, also came to its end.