Final answer:
The term "Iron Curtain" was coined by Winston Churchill to describe the ideological and physical divide between the Communist-dominated Eastern Europe and the Democratically-influenced West during the Cold War.
Step-by-step explanation:
The divide between the Communist Soviet Union and Democratic western countries was termed the "Iron Curtain" by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In March 1946, Churchill delivered a speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he emphasized the division of Europe into capitalist democracies in the West and communist-influenced states in the East, which were under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The term 'Iron Curtain' came to symbolize the ideological, physical, and political barriers that separated the two regions during the Cold War era, and it was an essential concept for understanding the dynamic of American-Soviet conflict that shaped global affairs until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.