Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism

The book that is provoking a major reexamination of the legacy of the Cold War.

In 2002, President George W. Bush declared, “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” Cold War Triumphalism exposes the ideological roots of such unabashed triumphalist accounts, and counters the current attempt to rewrite the history of the Cold War struggle.

Assembling some of the nation’s leading historians of U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, and recent American history, Cold War Triumphalism captures a generation of critical scholarship on America’s rise to global dominance after World War II. At a time when history is increasingly invoked to vindicate the war on terrorism, neoliberal globalization, and recent American military ventures, this book provides a necessary challenge to right-wing mythologizing. Widely praised when first published in hardcover, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand American global politics in the twenty-first century.