Today's lesson focused on the Korean War. Historians have written that the Korean War was a ''civil war,'' a war between Koreans over what kind of government and society they would have. However, neither the USSR or the US saw the Korean War in those terms. For the USSR, the civil war in Korea between the communist North and the capitalist South was a "proxy war" in which the superpowers could demonstrate their status. Immediately after the end of World War II, the US considered the economic and social rebuilding of Europe and Japan as allies against the USSR as the most important aspect of their policy of the containment of communism.