This ambitious study provides a new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and addresses the long-term political, economic, intellectual and religious developments in these regions that continue to shape the world to this day.

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s.

'Lüthi pushes the boundaries of the new global cold war historiography. Asia, the Middle East, and Europe all mattered, and not just because the superpowers intervened there. Decolonization, the rivalry of middle powers, non-alignment, and pan-Islamism are all given their due. A singular achievement.' Robert Vitalis, author of White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations