What was the cold war? Conventional wisdom makes it coextensive with an epoch stretching from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a geopolitical period dominated by the confrontation between the United States and the USSR. In a fundamental challenge to prevailing orthodoxy, Anders Stephanson explodes this misconception, which has misled historians and obscured the US-centered nature of the entire process. He argues that "the cold war" is better understood as the frame that made the global role of the US after 1947 not only possible but imperative, and that in its classic form it ended in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

American Imperatives does not assume that the causes of the great superpower rivalry rest solely with the United States. But the frame was unmistakably and ineradicably American. Without it, there would not have been, properly speaking, a cold war.