United States participant in Vietnam War
Cold War (1945–1991)
After World War II, the United States financed and implemented the Marshall Plan to help rebuild and economically revive war-torn Europe; disbursements paid between 1948 and 1952 would total $13 billion ($115 billion in 2021). Also at this time, geopolitical tensions between the United States and Soviet Russia led to the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism. The two countries dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellite states on the other. Unlike the US, the USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from its Soviet Bloc satellites using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. The U.S. sometimes opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, occasionally pursuing direct action for regime change against left-wing governments. American troops fought the communist forces in the Korean War of 1950–1953, and the U.S. became increasingly involved in the Vietnam War (1955–1975), introducing combat forces in 1965. Their competition to achieve superior spaceflight capability led to the Space Race, which culminated in the U.S. becoming the first and only nation to land people on the Moon in 1969. While both countries engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear weapons, they avoided direct military conflict.At home, the United States experienced sustained economic expansion, urbanization, and a rapid growth of its population and middle class following World War II. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's transportation infrastructure in decades to come. In 1959, the United States admitted Alaska and Hawaii to become the 49th and 50th states, formally expanding beyond the contiguous United States.
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