It would have been nice for the world to take a few years off fighting after World War II, but there were plenty of unresolved issues even after Germany and Japan were defeated. Independence movements percolated in European-held colonies across Africa and Asia, and China went back to fighting its civil war now that Japanese involvement was zeroed out. And in Europe, the Western Allies glared warily at the Soviet Union across occupied and divided Germany and Austria.

The Soviet Union imploded in 1991, and you'll notice that U.S.-Russian relations today are far from cuddly. But before the collapse, tensions remained at least somewhat high between the Western capitalist and social-democratic countries, headed by the United States, and the communist countries, headed by the Soviet Union with

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