1989
A01=Anders Stephanson
Author_Anders Stephanson
capitalism
Category=QDTS
communism
Cuban Missile Crisis
detente
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
foreign policy
hegemony
historiography
history
international relations
John Lewis Gaddis
Kennan
Odd Arne Westad
Perry Anderson
Russia
Second World War
socialism
Soviet
US
USSR
Product details
- ISBN 9781784780562
- Weight: 427g
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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What was the cold war? Conventional wisdom makes it coextensive with an epoch stretching from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical period dominated by the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. In a fundamental challenge to prevailing orthodoxy, Anders Stephanson explodes this misconception, which has misled historians and obscured the US-centered nature of the entire process. He argues that "the cold war" is better understood as the frame that made the global role of the US after 1947 not only possible but imperative, and that in its classic form it ended in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
American Imperatives does not assume that the causes of the great superpower rivalry rest solely with the United States. But the frame was unmistakably and ineradicably American. Without it, there would not have been, properly speaking, a cold war.
American Imperatives does not assume that the causes of the great superpower rivalry rest solely with the United States. But the frame was unmistakably and ineradicably American. Without it, there would not have been, properly speaking, a cold war.
Anders Stephanson, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, is the author of Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy and Manifest Destiny.
