Before we conclude that the Cold War era has ended, it might be well to decide which Cold War is under discussion. To telescope the past forty-five years into only a U.S.-Soviet confrontation might be convenient, but it is also ahistorical. While Americans and Russians, thankfully, did not kill each other in large numbers on battlefields, twenty-one million people did die in wars between the end of World War II and the Communist empire's collapse. Four million of these died in the Vietnam conflict of 1945 to 1975, and there were other casualties of that conflict in the realms of democratic and constitutional values that should not go unnoticed.

The Cold Wars, then, were of various intensities, not a single conflict, and many of the most important (and often most lethal) events of the post-1945 era occurred in those confrontations that were at times only faintly, if at all, related to the U.S.-Soviet struggle. The point deserves emphasis, not least because the policies that led to American involvement in these other, sometimes lethal, Cold Wars are continuing, even though the rationale that often shaped and drove those policies-anticommunism-has lost most of its validity and political appeal. There are historical continuities in U.S. foreign policy that need to be identified and closely examined, and those continuities can be missed, or, more often, dismissed amid the triumphalism that has multiplied like yellow ribbons since the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the defeat of Iraqi forces in early 1991.