The European international system collapsed, with the Second World War, and the results of that war led to radical transformations in the form of the distribution of power at the global level. The European countries, "the poles of the old regime, the Axis and the Allied Powers" emerged from the Second World War exhausted, economically, militarily and politically. , And then fell positions in the ladder hierarchy of international forces, while emerged two new global poles, the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and in the new situation are only able to determine the image of the entire international system, with their own capabilities. Thus, the international pattern shifted to its image, which became known as the bipolar international order. .
The sectarian strife between the two poles has had a profound effect on deepening the differences between them, and in the emergence of a new variable that has played a prominent role in the international struggle, the ideological factor. This sectarian dispute has divided the developed world into two main blocs: the Western "capitalist" bloc, The United States of America, the West European countries, Canada and Japan, and the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union and by the Eastern European countries. These are both the NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Both poles in their struggle with the other on the land of the Third World resort to indirect means, in order to avoid direct armed contact between them. Examples include diplomacy and economic propaganda, alliances, pro-government regimes, and the overthrow of hostile regimes. All this has resulted in the so-called Cold War.
This concept was first used by Prince Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century and then by the American economist Bernard Baruch "1870-1965" in early 1947 and became a common expression with the American journalist Walter Lippman (1889-1974) In general, the state of tension between the western and eastern blocs formed in 1945 was described in the wake of World War II.
This conflict has spread since the end of the Second World War, from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 can be seen as the end of the Cold War, although many of the ideological bases of this war had disappeared before.