Yalta System

얄타 체제

The international order rooted in the postwar settlement agreed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain at the Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July–August 1945) conferences, which de facto divided Europe and the world into spheres of influence of the two superpowers and supplied the structural framework of the Cold War. Its institutional pillars were ideological bipolar confrontation, nuclear deterrence, the emergence of divided nations (Germany, Korea, Vietnam), and the great-power veto in the UN Security Council. The system ended with the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. In Eastern European memory the term is pejorative (a great-power bargain over the fate of small nations) while in Cold War historiography it serves as an analytical concept for the postwar international order.