From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis: How Americans Learned to Live as a Superpower

This chapter examines how Americans adapted to their country’s new status as a global superpower in the early Cold War era. After World War II, the United States abandoned its isolationist traditions and entered ideological and geopolitical rivalry with the Soviet Union. Policymakers and intellectuals developed new frameworks for understanding this confrontation, most notably the doctrine of containment, which helped reconcile America’s global commitments with its traditional political ideals. The chapter analyzes how the Cold War reshaped both foreign policy and domestic politics: the institutionalization of national security policy, the expansion of academic and policy expertise on world regions, and the growth of cultural and ideological competition between the two superpowers. At the same time, global leadership exposed tensions within American society, as racial inequality, anti-communism, and debates over civil rights became issues with international political consequences.