The Cold War and the Color Line is a fairminded account of the interaction between Cold War foreign policy and race relations in the United States. Thomas Borstelmann's narrative follows the parallel struggles for civil rights within the United States and against colonialism and white supremacist regimes abroad. The central thesis of the book is that these processes influenced each other. Changing American race relations affected the way the United States fought the Cold War and responded to the end of European colonial rule, while the Cold War influenced the domestic civil rights movement in various ways.