American and Soviet soldiers occurred at Torgau, Ger., on April 25, 1945. Their handshakes and toasts in beer and vodka celebrated their common victory over Nazi Germany and marked the collapse of old Europe altogether; but their inarticulate grunts and exaggerated smiles presaged the lack of communication in their relationship to come. Grand wartime coalitions invariably break up once the common fight gives way to bickering over division of the spoils, but feuding victors after the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon or World War I at least negotiated treaties of peace, while the rancour among them was moderated by time or the danger that the common enemy might rise again. After 1945, however, no grand peace conference convened, no common fear of Germany or Japan survived, and the quarrels among the victors only grew year by year into what the U.S. presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the pundit Walter Lippmann termed a Cold War.

The U.S.–Soviet conflict began in 1945 over treatment of occupied Germany and the composition of the Polish government. It grew during 1946 as the Soviets communized the lands under their occupation and the victors failed to agree on a plan for the control of atomic energy. From 1947 to 1950 the reactions of Washington and Moscow to the perceived threats of the other solidified the division of Europe and much of the world into two blocs, and the Cold War became universalized, institutionalized, and militarized.

The settlement after World War II, therefore, was a peace without treaties, and the Cold War magnified, distorted, or otherwise played upon the other historical trends given impetus by the world wars of the 20th century: Asian nationalism, decolonization, the seeming culmination of the 37-year-old Chinese Revolution, the evolution of independent Communist parties in Yugoslavia and Asia, and western Europe’s drive to end four centuries of conflict through economic integration. The early Cold War was not a decade of fear and failure alone but also a creative time that gave birth to the closest thing to a world order that had existed since 1914. With the sole major exception of the later Sino-Soviet split, the boundaries, institutions, and relationships fashioned in the late 1940s were very nearly the same ones that shaped world politics through the 1980s.