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"Scours the history of the Cold War, from the end of World War II to the end of the Soviet Union, for clues as to why Americans and Russians think about each other the way they do and how the Cold War's legacies affect present politics and popular consciousness in both countries"-- Provided by publisher.

"In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with U.S.-Russia relations approaching a breaking point, this book provides a key to understanding how we got here. Specifically, Stephen P. Friot asks, how do Russians and Americans think about each other, and why do they see the world so differently? The answers, Friot suggests, lie in the historical events surrounding the Cold War and their divergent influence on politics and popular consciousness. Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how--in ways incomprehensible to Russians--U.S. politics are driven by American society's ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia--in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post-Cold War world. Amid the wreckage of the high hopes that accompanied the end of the Cold War, and as faith in a rules-based international order wanes, Friot's work provides a historical, cultural, and political framework for understanding the geopolitics of the moment and, arguably, for navigating a way forward."-- Provided by publisher.

Why the Cold War and Its Origins Still Matter

It Took Centuries to Get to Yalta

The Geopolitics of the Peace, 1945-1952

Truman and Kennan : The Beginning of Containment and the End of Isolationism

Geopolitical Realignment Becomes a Reality : A Tale of Two Nations and Their Leaders

Two Years That Set the Stage for the Next Four Decades

A Reflection on U.S. Leadership in the 1940s and Early 1950s

The Russian Bomb

NSC-68 : The Militarization of Containment

Politics and Policy in the First Decade of the Cold War : Getting Serious about Communism

From Korea to Khrushchev and the Thaw

Communism and the United States Supreme Court

Avoiding Armageddon

From Camelot to Saigon

Stalemate and the Birth and Death of Détente

From the Wilderness to the Promised Land : Carter and Brezhnev to Reagan, Bush, and Gorbachev.

United States > Foreign relations > Russia (Federation)

Russia (Federation) > Foreign relations > United States.