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An epic history destroys the idea of a single global ideological battle. Paul Kennedy reviews ‘The Cold War’ by Odd Arne Westad.
PHOTO: JOSEF KOUDELKA / MAGNUM PHOTOS
How do you measure, and best describe, the shape of that historically most important happening, the Cold War? That’s not a trick question, and the matter is much more complicated than you might first suppose. Was it simply a zero-sum struggle between the two greatest of the world powers that had emerged victorious from World War II—America and Russia—leading to an international rivalry scarier than all previous ones because of the existence of nuclear weapons? Was it a tussle that waxed and waned from, say, the Yalta Conference of 1945 until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991—and then it was all over? Or was it even more than that, perhaps an intense segment of the giant ideological struggle that has been waged between Western liberalism and its ideological foes since the coming of those twin drivers of modernity, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution? Was the Cold War essentially a European “thing,” founded in the chaos of the post-world-war wreckages, and ended when Moscow could no longer control its European satellites? Or was it more and more a global event, one that knew no continental boundaries?
THE COLD WAR: A WORLD HISTORY
By Odd Arne Westad
Basic Books, 710 pages, $40
In sum, when a scholar writes about it, what should he put in, and what, if anything, can be left out? An explosion of newly opened state archives everywhere, plus thousands and thousands of specialist studies and revealing autobiographies published in the past quarter-century makes even keeping up with all the new facts a difficult task. Pity the scholar, then, who has the temerity to attempt a grand synthetic study within the confines of a single volume, even a very hefty volume like Odd Arne Westad’s “The Cold War: A World History.”
Mr. Westad, currently a professor of history and of U.S.-Asia relations at Harvard University, is the author of several books on modern international history, including his best-selling study of China’s foreign policy, “Restless Empire.” His epic account—there are 630 pages of text, all admirably fluent—is basically chronological and therefore easy for a reader to follow. But there are also many parallel narratives as his analysis of international politics since World War II grows more and more global; thus, a chapter on the Cold War and Latin America is neatly sandwiched between a chapter on Vietnam and another on Brezhnev’s crumbling domestic scene. The chapter about the Cold War and India is followed by one on Middle East convulsions. There are truly fine stories in each; the pages on the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, for example, though few in number (there are only about five), are quite gripping. “When the main building of the hated security services was finally occupied,” the author writes, “the revolutionaries showed no mercy: ‘Six young officers came out, one very good-looking. Their shoulder boards were torn off. They wore no hats. They had a quick argument. “We’re not so bad as you think we are. Give us a chance,” they were saying. . . . Suddenly one began to fold; they were going down the way you’d cut corn. Very gracefully. They folded up smoothly, in slow motion. And when they were on the ground the rebels were still loading lead into them.’ ”
One reason Mr. Westad’s narrative is so strong is its use of fresh archival sources from across the globe. He might have been content with exploiting and summarizing the masses of information already available from secondary sources, especially given his own mastery of so many European and Asian languages, and his familiarity with all that literature, as witnessed in this book’s 38 pages of dense endnotes. Instead, the author continues the multilingual, multi-archival research for which he is known. The publishers have, alas, chosen not to include an alphabetical list of archival sources (which doesn’t help a professional scholar wanting to follow in the author’s footsteps), but I kept circling references to items in depositories like the following: “Records of the German Foreign Office,” “Churchill College Archives,” “Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation,” “Eisenhower Library,” “National Archives of India, New Delhi,” “John F. Kennedy Library Archives,” “National Archives of Egypt, Cairo” . . . and on. The author traveled the world to write this “world history.”
This is important, precisely because all these citations bring something new, or at least confirm in a much better way what scholars suspected about policy makers and policy. Thus, a reference by Mr. Westad to an Indian archives source brings us to a March 1969 document from India’s ministry of foreign affairs, showing Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s deep suspicion of both superpowers and her determination to pick India’s own best course between them. When readers get to see the maneuvers and ambitions of the Indians—and along with them the Vietnamese, Egyptians, Brazilians, Saudis, Poles (let alone de Gaulle or the Communist Chinese)—they may realize how contrived the term “bi-polar” really was, when used to describe the world of 50 years ago. It suggests that international politics consisted of lots and lots of atom-like nation-states rotating around two fixed poles of Washington and Moscow. In Mr. Westad’s nuanced account, nothing seems further than the truth.
It is a commonplace in today’s fractured world order to lament that “things were simpler during the Cold War,” and to suggest that the United States in particular has lost the affection and support of so many countries and their publics across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and so on. Mr. Westad’s more complicated narrative points again and again to how foreign governments were always—of course—selfish and calculating players in their own right, rarely if ever letting their ideological and cultural feelings for Washington or Moscow affect their own policy objectives. After all, at the end of the day, both the U.S.S.R. and the United States of America could choose to pull back from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America or the Congo, while the Afghans and Congolese could not. The stakes were different, priorities were far higher, and commitments greater.
Isn’t there a lesson for us today? If the Cold War “ended” in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, or in December 1991 when, amazingly, the then-leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus hastily dissolved the Soviet Union, it ended only in the sense that it was a gigantic global football match that had been waged between two national teams. This shift definitely affected, say, the mutual workings of America and Russian military planners, their defense budgets and their allocations of troops abroad. But the geopolitical changes may have meant much less on the ground, in so many other parts of the globe that were deeply preoccupied by their own affairs—affairs that would go on, regardless of happenings in Moscow or Washington. China would still rise, India would still stumble toward Great Power status, Arabs and Israelis would still fight, Afghan warlords would still resist foreign intruders, African states would still crumble, Belarus and Kazakhstan would still be in Moscow’s spheres of influence, Latin American countries would still conduct their love-hate minuet toward the United States. The “end” of the Cold War neither caused any of these problems nor prevented them from occurring. Viewed like this, the period between 1945 and 1991 appears in retrospect more and more like some sort of chessboard configuration of particular “bi-polar rigidity” that itself was only reflective of a set of richly fractured regional and global events that had their own beginnings, convulsions and directions.
When, really, did this giant global contest between Moscow and Washington end—or did it end at all? In the months around 1988 and 1989, some of Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisers used to tease their American counterparts by saying “We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an Enemy.” Would that we had all been so lucky. Would that a defeated Russia could have been integrated into the Western order in the way that post-Napoleonic France was after the Congress of Vienna, or West Germany after the end of the Third Reich. Since it didn’t happen like that, we are left with a disgruntled Russia, an economically damaged half-great power, and a Russian people so angry at Mr. Gorbachev and America that they have repeatedly embraced (at least, as the polls show it) their nationalist strongman, Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Westad ends his book, elegantly, thoughtfully and briefly, in a mere 12-page afterword, “The World the Cold War Made,” just after a chapter on the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East Germany and the Warsaw Pact. But his conclusion is, perhaps, too brief, and this reviewer is surely not alone in thinking that much of the Cold War, not just in military and economic rivalries but also in ideological differences, has endured. On the same morning the publisher’s proofs of “The Cold War: A World History” arrived in my mailbox, I found myself perusing an article in this newspaper by two very experienced Kremlin experts, Eugene Rumer and Andrew Weiss, detailing Moscow’s current efforts to make mischief in Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Venezuela, Turkey, the Baltic states and elsewhere. This systematic effort to undermine an American-based order and its many global institutions and partnerships would seem very familiar to an experienced diplomat of the 1960s or 1980s.
“How Big Was the Cold War?” is easy to answer: It was huge, as this book demonstrates, not only because of the perilous stakes but also because of the size of the two main actors. “How Deep Was the Cold War?” is also easy to answer, and Mr. Westad does that so very well, showing how it reached into so many places in the world that were a long way from the Berlin Wall. But “How Long Was the Cold War?” may be a question we are still not able to answer. Almost 30 years after the international political landscape crumbled, around the walls of Berlin, the dust still has not settled and the topography of the next world order remains out of sight.
—Mr. Kennedy is a professor of history at Yale University and the author and editor of many books, including “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”
