The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.

文安立（Odd Arne Westad）原籍挪威，現任英國倫敦經濟學院（LES)國際關係史教授，冷戰研究中心主任、《冷戰史》(Cold war History)主編以及多捲本《劍橋國際冷戰史》(Cambridge Cold War History）主編之一。他於1989年在美國北卡羅萊納大學獲博士學位，曾任挪威諾貝爾研究所研究部主任。他是近年來在國際學術界冷戰史研究中湧現齣的最負盛名的中青年學者之一。 在國際冷戰史學界，文安立原以研究中國與冷戰的學術成就而著稱。移席倫敦經濟學院後，他開始將研究的視角擴展到瞭整個第三世界與冷戰的研究方麵，開設瞭大量的相關課程，積纍瞭豐富的研究資源。