What was the Cold War? In a fundamental challenge to prevailing orthodoxy, Anders Stephanson argues that the conventional view since 1989 is essentially wrong, that it leads to the wrong kind of questions and ultimately serves to obscure the US-centred nature of the entire process. Instead, this book takes the position that 'the cold war' should be understood as the frame that made not only possible but imperative the global role (in principle if not in reality) of the United States after 1947, and that in its classic form it ended in 1963, after the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis. American Imperatives does not assume that the causes of the great superpower rivalry, and therefore blame for its outbreak, rest solely with the United States: the search for 'origins' has no absolute original point of departure. But the frame was unmistakably and ineradicably American. Without it, there would not have been, properly speaking, a cold war.