ABSTRACT
As Bill Clinton prepared for Inauguration Day, he understood his first, critical challenge in foreign affairs. For over four decades, the central pivot of American foreign policy had been the Cold War. The United States, emerging from World War II as the giant of the West, had faced the threat of a continent-sized Soviet Union and its empire of satellite states for almost forty-five years. The American policy, in this bipolar world, was containment, blocking the feared expansion of Soviet dominance short of a shooting war between the thermonuclear superpowers, a catastrophic conflict that would destroy them both and reduce the world to ashes. But now the Cold War was ending, and managing the transition from that long twilight struggle to a new and less threatening environment was the essential first task of the incoming President.
