Stevenson examines the expansive strategic thinking of the '50s and the '60s that made deterrence work and exhorts America to recapture that level of inventiveness and creativity for a new age. By examining both successes and failures of the Cold War, Stevenson provides the reader with a broader historical understanding of how transnational Islamist terrorism evolved against the backdrop of the nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and how Cold War strategic principles might be tailored to the different and in many ways more complicated threats we face today.