What was the end of the Cold War?

The end of the Cold War was the peaceful resolution of the more than four-decade ideological, political, and military rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, completed in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. The path from confrontation to resolution stretched across the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan ramped up American defense spending in his first term, calling the Soviet Union an evil empire in a March 1983 speech, and proposing the Strategic Defense Initiative.

After Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in March 1985, the relationship shifted. The two leaders met at the Geneva Summit in November 1985, the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986, the Washington Summit in December 1987, and the Moscow Summit in May and June 1988. They signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty on December 8, 1987, the first arms control agreement to actually destroy an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev's reforms of glasnost and perestroika opened Soviet society and weakened the Communist Party's grip. He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan between May 1988 and February 1989, ending the disastrous nine-year intervention. He explicitly renounced the use of force to keep Eastern European governments in power.

Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987 and declared, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. In 1989 a wave of peaceful revolutions swept Eastern Europe. Poland held semi-free elections in June. Hungary opened its border with Austria in May. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution and the overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu followed in November and December.

President George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev declared at the Malta Summit in December 1989 that the Cold War was over. Germany was reunified on October 3, 1990. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed on July 31, 1991 reduced strategic nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union itself dissolved on December 26, 1991, replaced by 15 independent countries.

The end of the Cold War left the United States as the sole superpower for nearly two decades. The phrase end of history was used by political scientist Francis Fukuyama to describe the apparent triumph of liberal democracy and market economics, though events in the years that followed showed the world remained more complicated than that claim suggested.