The era herein reviewed began in the closing months of World War II and ended with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The central thread in the tapestry of the international politics of the time was the Soviet-American confrontation. In 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States, allied in the war against the Axis powers, crushed their enemies and emerged from the war triumphant, each with only the other remaining as a credible adversary. The next forty-five years constituted what John Lewis Gaddis has called the “Long Peace,” as the two great empires competed without direct conflict between them. And then the Soviet empire collapsed and was gone.

The period was also striking because of the disintegration of all of the pre–World War II colonial empires, and the appearance of scores of newly independent states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As each of these new nations struggled to define itself, to search for some modicum of wealth and power, it contributed another ripple to the tides of world affairs, sometimes barely perceptible, often so evident as to force one or both of the great powers to change course. There was too much turmoil in the world for any country, even one as powerful as the United States, to exercise hegemony. And along the way the locus of power shifted, as Chinese military strength developed, and as Japan, South Korea, and the ASEAN states demonstrated their economic vitality.