Almost a decade ago, when I attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in Berlin, the narrative structure of this book emerged before my eyes. Wagner’s idea of a network of stories that intersect and influence each other has fascinated me since the early 1990s when I first saw the complete performance of his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Its second part, Die Walküre, sparked my vision of writing a reinterpretation of the Cold War as an interconnected set of narratives that focuses on how middle and smaller actors at the regional level shaped that global conflict.