NSC 68, and the rearmament program that it spawned, fundamentally altered the course of the Cold War. The Cold War certainly had begun as early as 1946–1947, but it did not become the rigid standoff that characterized it for the roughly forty years after 1950 until the advent of NSC 68. NSC 68 was a point of departure for the United States in its relations with the Soviet Union and virtually the entire world. It marked the point at which the country, under the guidance of the multilateralists in the Truman administration and their private colleagues, gave up any and all pretense of cooperating with the Soviet Union and took the position that only unbridled power in its own hands – hegemony – could secure the kind of world that would allow the United States itself to function along liberal capitalist democratic lines, a world defined in terms of multilateralism by those committed to multilateralism.