Almost every nation in the world was affected by superpower rivalry in the Cold War. Asian and Latin American countries were especially affected, since they were caught in strategically vital areas of the superpower conflict. This paper will examine how China and Nicaragua were affected by the Cold War. This paper will focus on the fall of Chiang Kai-Shek in China in 1949 and America’s imperialistic oppression of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Overall, the thesis of this paper will argue that communism triumphed in China because of the military superiority of the communist forces, and that the Sandinista experiment in Nicaragua failed because of U.S. determinism to continue exploiting Latin America in the Cold War.