My view, shared by very few, is that the Cold War was distinctly a US project that began in 1946–47 and ended in 1963. Its original impetus was to make internationalism — a euphemism for a worldwide scope of potential intervention — an unshakeable shibboleth of bipartisan foreign policy. Thus it denied the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and banished sustained diplomacy as appeasement and moral dissipation.

It was a frame as well as a policy — though officialdom was notably reluctant to embrace the term itself. Dean Acheson, when he thought about it, preferred the term “cold peace” and, though it was axiomatic that the Soviet Union embodied war (as overdetermined by the more fundamental dedication to world conquest) and the United States, peace, there was a sense that the duality of a war somehow spilled over into mutuality, to oneself as well.