Any advance for U. Civil wars in Korea, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua took on international dimensions and attracted international support. At every table of government in every country around the world, there was an empty chair, potentially to be occupied by the power of the U. The Cold War belonged to the whole world, not just the superpowers armed with atomic weapons.
With his latest book, a wise and observant history titled simply The Cold War , Westad aims to bring this global view of the conflict to a wider audience. The new book provides a more comprehensive account of the Cold War than his earlier work, tracking its repercussions in every corner of the world, and spends less time in debates with other historians.
There is general agreement that it started between and , and ended between and Tensions ran especially high from the end of World War II in to the Cuban missile crisis in , then relaxed somewhat, only to rebound in the s. But throughout those four-plus decades, the threat that atomic warfare would destroy human life loomed large. Westad has long argued that we should take a broader view of the roots of the Cold War. For him, its distinctive feature was the competition between capitalism and communism.
In his earlier book, he placed the beginning of the Cold War in the Russian Revolution of The competition was for the society of the future, and there were only two fully modern versions of it: the market, with all its imperfections and injustices, and the plan, which was rational and integrated. Soviet ideology made the state a machine acting for the betterment of mankind, while most Americans resented centralized state power and feared its consequences. The stage was set for an intense competition, in which the stakes were seen to be no less than the survival of the world.
The new states of the Soviet bloc excluded hostile forces from government—which meant suppressing the right, splitting the left, and putting loyal Communists in charge of minority governments that would necessarily have to depend on Moscow and rule by force. In Western Europe, the United States faced a similar challenge.
Needing to ensure a return to viable capitalism, administrations from Truman on also split the left, ignored the crimes of the right, and worked to bar Communists from power.
The United States, however, could accommodate a broader range of outcomes in Europe than the Soviets could. It tolerated countries in which the moderate left operated democratically and built up the welfare state, because doing so undermined the appeal of communism by proving that capitalism could provide public services and a social safety net. But if Communists threatened to gain too much influence in Western Europe, America attempted to undermine their success through covert action —as it did in elections in France in and in Italy in In and , when elected governments tried to nationalize British-owned oil in Iran and distribute American-owned land in Guatemala to peasants, they were overthrown by the CIA.
Similarly, the Soviet Union could not abide political reforms within its sphere of influence: A more open socialism in Hungary was crushed in , when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Surely not everything between and can be described as the result of the Cold War; that period, after all, includes the World War II alliance between the U.
Both superpowers attempted to gather influence and to secure commitments to their way of seeing and interpreting the world. And that means that even the phenomena that are not reducible to Cold War tensions were affected by it. Consider the process of decolonization that accelerated in the years after World War II. The United States nominally took an anti-colonial position.
It supported decolonization—as it did in Dutch Indonesia—if it thought the brutality of colonial rule might make communism look attractive by comparison. New York: Macmillan, Google Scholar. This list only refers to American critiques of different aspects of the Cold War system written from within the framework of establishment thinking.
Long before Kissinger it was evident that the Cold War was no longer intellectually credible or defensible. Industrialisation also transformed the social structure of the Soviet bloc, creating, as a result, a mass intelligentsia who came to dominate the economy, party and state. Their emergence solved a fundamental problem, namely, to which group could the West orient and successfully appeal? Not surprisingly the intelligentsia became the most favoured Soviet bloc group in the West. On the special place allotted to the intelligentsia see F.
Barghoorn, ibid. It was not Soviet economic competition in the Third World which could have worried the West in the Cold War or indeed since. In spite of a concerted economic and political drive towards the Third World since , the USSR has lost many of its former political allies and clearly has not substituted itself economically for the West.
On Soviet failure in the Third World see the recent review by W. Roi ed. House of Reps. Review Google Scholar. What concerned Kissinger and his successors therefore was not Soviet economic penetration, nor the fact that it created instability, but its political and military support to anti-Western forces in unstable situations. America also possessed missiles in Polaris submarines, and or more intercontinental bombers the Soviets only about ; in R.
Daniel Ellsberg argues that American superiority was even greater than the offical figures show. Certainly after the Kennedy build-up, by the mid 60s, the United States had something close to a first-strike capability: D.
I agreements as instruments designed to domesticate and contain Soviet power, not unleash it. Europe had always resented trade embargoes, but its economic and political dependence upon America meant that only when this was reduced could it ignore American controls over East-West trade; which it did increasingly through the late s and early s.
On trade embargoes and their disputed effectiveness see J. See E. Reischauer, Beyond Vietnam. Burnell ed. Kissinger ed. Kirk and N. See his excellent discussion of the reasons why the Soviet Union was forced to turn to the West, pp. The escalating costs of subsidising, controlling, and trading solely with Eastern Europe are discussed by G. Marer in C. Gati ed. The Times at least got it right.
It did not give the Russians the confirmation of the status quo which they sought. Sinanian et al , op. The new cold war argument has also been used to legitimise the peace movement, and has been generally accepted on the left.
In the s and s Western Europe and Japan had often complained against the USA, arguing that trade embargoes against the Soviet bloc only helped to limit their competitiveness. Witness the several failed harvests in and after On the cause of the agricultural crisis see G. American business is today clearly opposing massive arms expenditure. See R. All recent American efforts to either limit Western technology transfers or prevent the gas pipeline deal have been defeated, with the United States retreating before a fairly united West European opposition.
For a general discussion of the issues see S. See J. See L. Brandon in the The Sunday Times , 8 August Paris Match 5 June Such an assessment could not have been made and believed in Sir John Hackett expressed this position very well in a recent interview.
Interestingly Lord Carver, a critic of the arms race, supports the division of Europe in the name of peace and stability. Being a military man it is certain that he regards Soviet power in Europe as less problematic than a revived Germany.
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