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Détente is the relaxation of strained relations, especially political ones, through verbal communication. The diplomacy term originates from around 1912, when France and Germany tried unsuccessfully to reduce tensions. -
The United Nations, referred to informally as the UN, is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. -
The Cold War began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the uneasy alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other started to fall apart. -
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc -
With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. -
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control. -
The Marshall Plan was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred $13.3 billion in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II. -
On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC). -
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 31 member states – 29 European and two North American. -
After five years of simmering tensions on the Korean peninsula, the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, when the North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea in a coordinated all-out attack at various strategic points along the 38th parallel, the line that divides North Korea -
The Korean War was fought between North Korea and South Korea from 1950 to 1953. The war began on 25 June 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea following clashes along the border and rebellions in South Korea. -
A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time, and in January 1950 he was found guilty and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years. -
McCarthyism, also known as the second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and socialist influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. -
In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage under the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917. Members of the communist party, the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in 1945. -
Formally known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, the Warsaw Pact was created on 14 May 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to the Alliance. -
On 1 May 1960, a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defence Forces while conducting photographic aerial reconnaissance deep inside Soviet territory. -
The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that encircled West Berlin of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic. Construction of the Berlin Wall was commenced by the government of the GDR on 13 August 1961. -
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles, covertly financed and directed by the United States. It was aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro's communist government. -
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, the Caribbean Crisis in Russia, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. -
April 1, 1965. Shortly after Operation Rolling Thunder began in 1965, President Johnson committed the first U.S. ground troops to the Vietnam War. -
Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops". -
Ping-pong diplomacy refers to the exchange of table tennis players between the United States and People's Republic of China in the early 1970s, that began during the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan as a result of an encounter between players Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong. -
The Fall of Saigon, also known as the Liberation of Saigon or the Liberation of the South by the Vietnamese government, and known as Black April by the Vietnamese -
Perestroika lasted from 1985 until 1991, and is often argued to be a significant cause of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This marked the end of the Cold War. -
The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall.