Using published material from both public and private sources, this concise text focuses on US/Soviet diplomacy to explain the causes and consequences of the Cold War. This edition includes a new final chapter which considers the Bush administration's foreign policy throughout its first term, the events of the attempted coup in Moscow, and the end of Soviet communism and its effect on US foreign relations throughout the world. In addition, newly available materials have been used in rewriting the section on the 1962 missile crisis.