For fifty years relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were deciding factors in international affairs. War against Germany brought them together in 1941 in an alliance that was decisive in securing Germany's defeat. Victory ultimately drove them apart, giving rise to the continuous, if fluctuating, antagonism that we know as the Cold war. In 1991, following the collapse of communism and the redrawing of the political map of central Europe, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated and with it the Cold war. Only now is it possible to view these years as a defined period of history. This book is an examination of the US-Soviet relationship within its global context. It breaks new ground in seeking a synthesis of historical narrative and analysis of the global structures within which superpower relations developed. Attention is given to economic as well as political and military factors. This is an authoritative and comprehensive history of the fifty years' war and the relationship that has dominated world politics in the second half of the twentieth century.