The Second World War transformed international relations. It destroyed or weakened the old great powers, paving the way for the decolonization of their extensive empires in Europe, Asia and Africa. It left just two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union; the former with overwhelming economic strength and a monopoly of nuclear weapons, and the latter with preponderant conventional armed forces and a widely attractive ideology. And it resulted in the birth of a new set of international regimes and organizations, whose aim was to provide stability in the security and economic spheres. How did the leaders in various key states respond to this new world? Our earlier volume explored the ‘mental maps’–the geographic vision–of a range of pivotal figures in the 1914–45 period. In the Introduction to that volume, we provided the intellectual rationale for this focus, as well as outlining the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the concept of ‘mental maps’. 1 To summarize, our central aim is to provide a focus for the study of international history that preserves what is distinctive about particular cultures by exploring the subject through the minds of major leaders. 2 These mental maps were formed not only by age, education, experience and personal values but also by the recognition of the structural forces–geographic, strategic, economic, political and ideological–with which they had to contend.

This book applies the same concept to the 1945–68 period. It explores how post-war political leaders dealt with the problems of Cold War–the clashing ideologies and the vying for supremacy in areas laid waste by the war, the arms race and the effort to compete without sparking a nuclear Third World War. It looks at the US and Soviet leaders who were ‘present at the creation’of the Cold War order, when they