The Cold War has dominated American life since 1945. It has cost Americans $2 trillion in defense expenditures, taken the lives of nearly 100,000 of their young men, ruined the careers of many others during the McCarthyite witch hunts, led the nation into the horrors of Southeast Asian conflicts, and in the 1980s triggered the worst economic depression in forty years. It has not been the most triumphant chapter in American diplomatic history.