In The President Has Been Shot!, James Swanson focuses extensively on the Cold War. The origins of the Cold War start with World War II. The war had severely weakened Japan and the powers of Europe, loosening or outright destroying their grip on their colonial empires. Meanwhile, the United States emerged relatively unscathed, with an economy bolstered by the war effort. Although the Soviet Union had been badly devastated and lost tens of millions of lives during the war, it soon recovered and also became a major military and economic power.

During World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union had been allies. After the war, tensions grew between them. They were the post-war world’s two superpowers, something historians and political scientists call the “bipolar” world. However, they also had very different economic and political systems. The United States followed capitalism and democratic principles of government; the Soviet Union practiced Communism and had an authoritarian, strongly centralized government. It was not just a rivalry between governments, but between different ideologies.

Since both superpowers had nuclear weapons, they avoided direct military confrontation. Instead, they fought each other via proxy wars, meaning wars where other countries went to war with their backing, or fostered regime changes in other countries to create allies and eliminate rivals.