officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died. However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule. During World War II, the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany. As a result, many leaders of independence movements in the 1960s and 1970s tried to be "nonaligned"-to not pick a side.The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States. The United States practiced a kind of informal imperialism where they replaced leaders they did not like in other countries-Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Salvador Allende in Chile were prime examples. The Soviets treated Eastern European states almost like colonies, and often tried to dominate their allies around the world. Both superpowers declared themselves to be anti-empire, though some historians argue they were really building empires of their own. That meant both the US and the USSR could be recruited to help anti-colonial movements. The Soviet Union promised to liberate workers from the shackles of capitalist, imperial rule. The US proclaimed that it supported democracy and free markets. The Cold War and decolonization were also linked by the actions of the two superpowers.
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