An awkward situation resulted as the Soviet Union and the United States refused to retreat to their corners - fearful that the other might try to take over their war gains. The United States, with reduced troop number in Europe but with its newly acquired nuclear weapon in hand, defied Russia to come any further west, or the meddle in the affairs of the liberal democractic governments there. Likewise, Russia defied the United States to intervene as the Russian military occupation replaced the governments in the eastern sector with Stalinist regimes.

Soon armed with its own nuclear weapon, the Soviet Union knew that the United States could not challenge it in its zone of influence - any more then Russia could challenge the United States in its zone. By 1950, a stalemate had settled in.

At this point, the entire western world, indeed the whole world, was involved in an on-going test of strength (the Cold War) between these two military giants. The United States claimed to represent the older legacy of European liberal bourgeois democracy and capitalism (intermixed with its American Protestantism). Soviet Russia claimed to represent the new wave of Marxist scientific socialism or Communism (hierarchically controlled industrialism - a system that Marx would never have recognized). As this military standoff became also a moral standoff, the world looked on in horror wondering what might be the outcome.

In short, in those 50 years the position of movers of western history had shifted from its old center in western Europe to its periphery: to America in the west and to Russia in the east. Europe proper was caught in the middle, by sheer necessity having to ally with one or the other power - willingly or unwillingly.

Human Growth: The theme that marks this period is growth - incredible growth or development in the human picture. During the second half of the 20th century the world was treated to a period of peace that permitted both the rapid rise in the size of the human population and in the equally rapid growth in its accumulated wealth. And along with this numeric growth went an incredible growth in the quality of life - particularly in terms of the individual's ability to live in a vastly wider realm of personal freedom and personal economic opportunity.

Dynamics of the Cold War: To be sure, the dark clouds of Cold War hung over the world for most of this "peaceful" period. But the Cold War between Russia and the United States remained stalemated in terms of direct confrontation between the superpowers for all but the last ten years of this period (when in the late 1980s the Russian political-economic system built under Stalin collapsed).

Living within the American sphere of influence and receiving vital industrial encouragement from America as a buffer to an expansionistic Russia, western Europe during this half-century enjoyed a wonderful peace under which it could rebuild itself. Indeed, without the incentive of the Cold War, it is unlikely that western Germany (as well as Japan in east Asia) would have seen such a quick post-war return to both national freedom and prosperity.

Even eastern Europe, though under Soviet dominance and industrial exploitation during most of this period, also experienced a measurable amount of growth and stability, though much less extensively than in the west. In the end the slowness of the eastern growth in comparison to the west's growth proved to be the undoing of Stalinism in the east - even within the Soviet Union itself.

Though, there were wars in and around the rest of the world - as for instance in Vietnam, in which the Cold War mentality drew the United States into an ill-fated intervention which ravaged Vietnam and backfired on the United States. But these conflicts generally remained quite limited in scope, in part because the superpowers would intervene to create a stalemate that served to prevent the conflict from escalating into a larger direct Russian-American confrontation. The stalemate, of course, also served to force peace upon the local combatants.

Certainly the superpowers were at times blamed for being the cause, or at least the worsening, of local conflicts. But in fact, a fair appraisal of history reveals that the actual level of conflict in our world during this era was greatly reduced from what it might have been because of the Cold War diplomatic stalemate (with the important exception of Vietnam, where America's president Johnson determined to involve his country in direct, unilateral military action). Indeed, in those conflicts in which the superpowers showed little interest in controlling the outcomes, violence achieved historically high levels. And when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, violence returned even to Europe itself when there were no longer competing superpower interests to force management of local conflicts.

Overall, the Cold War was responsible for much of the positive development in and around the rest of the world. Most importantly, the competition to show off the respective American and Russian social systems caused these two countries to busy themselves in developmental work which aided enormously in the creation of important industrial infrastructure in the industrially emergent world of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In the competition between the superpowers they put their respective accomplishments before the world as a choice: the rapid rags-to-riches rise of the Russians after the second World War through its tightly organized social system - versus the quite apparent wealth-for-everyone accomplishments of the American free-consumer system. Though the Soviet system was quite attractive at first (the 1960s) to those Asian, African and Latin American societies which hoped to duplicate the Russian rapid rise to power, in the end it was the consumer society projected by America that won the day - even in Russia itself. By 1990, America had clearly won the Cold War through its sheer ability to create greater wealth. It literally spent the Russian system to death.