Although Borstelmann acknowledges that racial considerations had relatively little impact on U.S. strategic priorities after 1945, he makes a convincing case that racial discrimination and violence at home were a continuing source of embarrassment to the United States abroad. In addition to international attention to the civil rights movement in the United States and the violence of the white supremacist reaction to it, Borstelmann recounts many incidents of discrimination against nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries. Events like these undermined American efforts to recruit nonwhite allies during the Cold War. He concludes that “there was no greater weakness for the United States in waging the Cold War than inequality and discrimination” (268).

Race also influenced Cold War foreign policy through the unexamined (and unreconstructed) beliefs and prejudices of American foreign policymakers, nearly all of whom were white. Borstelmann shows that many of the most important American policy makers of the Cold War, including Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others, held disturbingly racist attitudes. Indeed, these attitudes were apparently normal and prevalent among foreign policymakers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, when many new African and Asian states became independent. Not surprisingly, these decision makers generally sided with European colonial powers and white supremacist regimes in southern Africa. Although Borstelmann is careful to note the efforts of some American policymakers to improve relations with these newly independent countries, most were oblivious to the interests of these emerging states. As a result, American relations with many of them were quite rocky throughout this period.

At the same time, Borstelmann points out that the ongoing Cold War influenced the domestic struggle for racial equality in the United States. The fact that presidents worried about international perceptions of American race relations gave civil rights leaders leverage. Such incidents as the violence surrounding attempts to integrate high schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, were sufficient to elicit a response even from a relatively indifferent administration (p. 102–4). The Cold War also gave added ideological weight to the civil rights movement's demands for legal equality. On the other hand, the author is not blind to the fact that white supremacists were sometimes able to use Cold War anticommunism to attack civil rights leaders and justify repressive action against them. Nevertheless, the overall effect of the Cold War on the civil rights movement is generally positive in his account.

Although the book is a general overview of race and the Cold War, its central concerns are African American civil rights and U.S. relations with African states during the 1945–68 period. Borstelmann discusses racism against Asians, Native Americans, and Jews, but most of the book focuses on African Americans. Similarly, although it includes a chapter reviewing the role of race in American foreign policy before 1945, and briefly discusses recent presidential administrations, its main focus is on the period between the end of World War II and 1968, after which, “the story of how these two themes intersected retreated from center stage in American politics” (p. 222). The parallels between presidential responses to the domestic African American civil rights movement and colonialism and white supremacy in Africa are especially striking during these years, and they support Borstelmann's overall argument that policymakers confronted essentially the same racial issue both at home and abroad.

The book reveals a recurring pattern that sometimes undermines Borstelmann's assessments of particular presidents. Even though some were more sympathetic than others to both the domestic civil rights movement and the international struggle against colonialism and white supremacy, none placed these concerns ahead of the Cold War preoccupation with Soviet influence. Even Jimmy Carter, who explicitly sought to stress human rights concerns and deemphasize the Cold War, was ultimately unable to sustain this set of priorities. Borstelmann spends quite a bit of time discussing the racial attitudes of various presidents. However, in spite of their differing personal views, all converged on a strikingly similar set of policy choices that put Cold War security concerns—even rather dubious ones—ahead of human rights, opposition to racism, and other values associated with progressive race relations. He does a good job demonstrating why presidents who were relatively indifferent to racial concerns, such as Eisenhower, were unable to completely ignore these issues at home. Unfortunately, the reason the Cold War consistently trumped these other concerns in the foreign policy arena is less clear in his account.

Overall, The Cold War and the Color Line makes a useful contribution to the literature on the politics of American foreign policy and race relations. It makes a convincing case that domestic racial issues influenced Cold War foreign policy, and vice versa.