ABSTRACT
The English historian Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, was born in 1945 to a working-class family in the north of England. The first of his family to attend university, he graduated in history with first-class honors from Newcastle University. Rise and Fall, a book dealing with the politics of power at a time of great instability, was timely. It was published in 1987, just a few years before the end of the Cold War and the shift in the international balance of power that followed. During the Cold War, a period of heightened global tension, the United States and the Soviet Union (the USSR) engaged in covert operations, nuclear posturing, and proxy wars against one another. But the hostility never broke into open conflict. In the late 1980s, America had taken on a newly aggressive posture, and the Soviet Union stretched its budget to match the threat.
