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This guide examines the Cold War and its lasting legacy. James Cronin carefully explores the creation and structure of the post-war settlement; its successes, failures and adaptions; and the eventual coming apart of the post-war order in the 1980s and early 1990s. Cronin argues that the current state of the world must be understood against the backdrop of the post-war order that until recently governed, prevented or distorted political and economic change. Cronin shows how this legacy has allowed some nations and industries to grow but has blocked others' paths to economic development. States whose very identities are threatened and whose positions within the larger community are in flux struggle to find a path to prosperity, while a sharply competitive logic sharply limits the options available to them. At the same time, Cronin states, the end of the Cold War has removed powerful external constraints on the political choices of nations, allowing previously disenfranchised peoples the freedom to chart distinctive paths into the next century that are more responsive to their own histories.