What happened after the Cold War ended?

Answer 1

After the Cold War ended, there were numerous changes across the world. Some of the major ones are outlined here, but this list is not anywhere near exhaustive.

1) Eastern Europe: Former Eastern bloc nations became democratic through peaceful negotiations between the Ancien Regimes and revolutionaries. (The one exception being Romania which required violent revolution.) No country in Eastern Europe retains a strong Communist Party and all of them are Representative Republics with a relatively high degree of freedom.

2) Soviet Union: The Soviet Union fell apart into 15 distinct nations (even though 76% of the territory remained in the Federated Republic of Russia). The Communist Party floundered and the era of Boris Yeltsin began in Russia after Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down. Strong Communist Parties or Cults of Personality persisted in Transcausia for some time and most of the former Soviet Union (the Baltic countries excepted) have had issues maintaining free and open democratic nations.

3) South America: Without the fear of communism prevailing in Latin America, the governments of these countries began to shift to their more-natural left-of-US-center center. Many states in South America restored voting and free campaigning in their governments. This has resulted in center-left politics from Chile and Brazil and far left politics from Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Answer 2

At the end of WWII the United States and Russia were allies, but soon after the war was over it was shown that Russia was still wanted a Communist World Revolution. They further showed their aggressive goals by crying " capitalist encirclement " at the very time America was pulling troops from Europe. The Soviets started to bring down the "iron curtain" over their smaller neighbors like Poland and Hungry Moscow's iron fist policy made many people alarmed. Truman wrote " I'm tired of babying the Soviets." and he adopted a get tough policy with Russia in 1947. The President went before Congress on March 12, 1947 and urged support of the Truman Doctrine. He felt that America should try to halt or contain Communist aggression where ever it threatened free people. He asked Congress to appropriate 400,000,000 for the economic and military bolstering of Greece and Turkey. He thought he was saving them from Soviet control. The struggle to stem Soviet Communism resulted in what came to be known as "the COLD WAR." It was not a war, yet it wasn't peace either.

So, to answer your question, now that you understand the history, nothing happened. Since it wasn't a real war or an event when Russia began to fall apart so did the concept of the cold war. There was no Communist Revolution to fight, no men sitting in tanks on both sides of the Berlin Wall to shoot at each other, no red phones on the desk, and finally we found out that the Russians were just Russians after all.