Algeria sits at the crossroads of the Atlantic, European, Arab, and African worlds. Yet, unlike the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Algeria's fight for independence has rarely been viewed as an international conflict. Even forty years later, it is remembered as the scene of a national drama that culminated with Charles de Gaulle's decision to "grant" Algerians their independence despite assassination attempts, mutinies, and settler insurrection.

Yet, as Matthew Connelly demonstrates, the war the Algerians fought occupied a world stage, one in which the U.S. and the USSR, Israel and Egypt, Great Britain, Germany, and China all played key roles. Recognizing the futility of confronting France in a purely military struggle, the Front de Lib�ration Nationale instead sought to exploit the Cold War competition and regional rivalries, the spread of mass communications and emigrant communities, and the proliferation of international and non-governmental organizations. By harnessing the forces of nascent globalization they divided France internally and isolated it from the world community. And, by winning rights and recognition as Algeria's legitimate rulers without actually liberating the national territory, they rewrote the rules of international relations.

Based on research spanning three continents and including, for the first time, the rebels' own archives, this study offers a landmark reevaluation of one of the great anti-colonial struggles as well as a model of the new international history. It will appeal to historians of post-colonial studies, twentieth-century diplomacy, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

A Diplomatic Revolution was winner of the 2003 Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Akira Iriye International History Book Award, The Foundation for Pacific Quest.

This latest edition of our classic text draws on analysis of new material released from archives in Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and other capitals of communist-bloc nations—helping to develop a truly international history of the Cold War, a complex and dynamic conflict that lasted more than forty years and continues to shape the foreign policy of the United States and other nations. Another important recent trend considered is the intensive study of the role of ideology in influencing policy on both sides of the conflict. Dr. Levering holds that the liberal internationalism espoused by leading Democrats and Republicans during World War II, plus most Americans’ profound dislike of communism and communists, contributed greatly to America’s decision to oppose postwar Soviet foreign policy. Many recent studies of the Cold War emphasize the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in postwar Soviet and Chinese foreign policy. Although these new directions in scholarship are important, the basic emphases of the original edition remains the same—U.S. actions and public opinion and relations between the two leading actors in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union. Enhanced as well is coverage of the two large-scale but limited wars that grew out of the conflict, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and of the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear age thus far, the Cuban missile crisis.