In 1950, when Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-Sung met in Moscow to discuss the future, they
had reason to feel optimistic. International communism seemed everywhere on the offensive: Stalin was at the height
of his power; all of Eastern Europe was securely in the Soviet camp; America's monopoly on nuclear weapons was
a thing of the past; and Mao's forces had assumed control over the world's most populous country. Everywhere on
the globe, colonialism left the West morally compromised. The story of the previous five decades, which saw severe
economic depression, two world wars, a nearly successful attempt to wipe out the Jews, and the invention of weapons
capable of wiping out everyone, was one of worst fears confirmed, and there seemed as of 1950 little sign, at least
to the West, that the next fifty years would be any less dark.
In fact, of course, the century's end brought the widespread triumph of political and economic freedom over its
ideological enemies. How did this happen? How did fear become hope? In The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis makes a
major contribution to our understanding of this epochal story. Beginning with World War II and ending with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, he provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, rich
with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and much fresh insight into its most crucial events. The
first significant distillation of cold war scholarship for a general readership, The Cold War contains much new
and often startling information drawn from newly opened Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives. Now, as America
once again finds itself in a global confrontation with an implacable ideological enemy, The Cold War tells a story
whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand.