When an historical era comes to an end the pundits move on and the historians move in. When major issues have been decided, or have faded in importance, commentary on them thins out and looks backward rather than forward. The emphasis shifts from arguments about what should be done and speculation about what will happen to judgements about significance and insignificance, right and wrong, and success and failure.
The passage of time, along with the publication of memoirs and the opening of official records, affords historical perspective. Up to a point, judgements tend to converge. To be sure, no verdict on a major chapter of history ever commands unanimous assent. Historians continue to disagree about aspects of the Roman Empire. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl called the writing of history an “argument without end.” Still, perspective enables historians to achieve a degree of consensus on events and trends that is unavailable while they are under way, just as the Manhattan skyline is clearer and more sharply defined when seen from the palisades of New Jersey than from the the heart of Times Square, even if disagreement persists on which of its buildings are the most graceful.
At a certain point after an historical chapter closes it becomes possible to write an account of it that incorporates such consensus as exists, and that may therefore stand as reliable, and as close to definitive as it is possible to come, for a generation. The Cold War, extinct for more than a quarter century, has reached that point, and with The Cold War: A World History Odd Arne Westad has written such an account.
Westad calls the Cold War “an international system,” by which he means a conflict, with its origins in Europe, whose impact radiated outward to the rest of the world. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the great contest between the Western democracies, led by the United States, and the communist order, with the Soviet Union at its helm, affected—although it did not entirely determine—developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hence a history of the Cold War must be global in scope, and Westad’s book fulfills that requirement. He overlooks no part of the world and omits no event of any consequence, and he strings them all together in a clearly written narrative. The author of a number of other works on this subject, he has plainly absorbed as much of the voluminous corpus of documentary records and secondary sources as any individual can hope to do. The Cold War qualifies as a considerable achievement.
Some of the book’s strengths also count as weaknesses. The reporting of historical details, for example, sometimes comes at the expense of larger trends. The discussion of the Korean War faithfully reconstructs what is now known from the still-incomplete historical record about the decision by three communist leaders—Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China—to launch it. The reader does not learn, however, of the wider consequences of that decision, namely that Korea turned the Cold War from a European to a global conflict and from a largely economic and political to a military contest, as well as introduced into the repertoire of Western foreign policy the concept of limited war, which replaced the World War II aim of total victory.
A book such as this one renders many judgements, and they are, for the most part, balanced. Westad writes critically, sometimes very critically, about the United States but does not neglect the mistakes, failures, and above all the crimes of the communist side. The treatment of some parts of the world is, inevitably, more thorough, accurate, and convincing than of others. The author is best on East Asia, an academic specialty of his, and Europe, his home region: he was born in Norway and taught in London before moving to Harvard.
The Cold War is weakest on the Middle East. Of the 1967 war there, for example, Westad writes that Israel “was undoubtedly the aggressor.” To the contrary: It was the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser who ordered the removal of the UN peacekeepers from the border between the two countries who had been stationed there as part of the multinational agreement to end the previous Arab-Israeli war in 1956; it was Egypt that blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s outlet to the Red Sea, an act of war that the Eisenhower Administration had promised Israel in the wake of the 1956 war it would reverse if it were ever undertaken—a promise that, in 1967, the Johnson Administration did not honor; and it was the Arab countries’ repeated declarations that they would erase the Jewish state from the map that convinced the Israelis that they faced the prospect of individual and collective annihilation.
Similarly, Westad devotes only a single paragraph to the Iran-Iraq war that killed more people between 1980 and 1988 than any other interstate conflict during the Cold War era, and pronounces it “a needless, aimless struggle.” Iraq’s Saddam Hussein began that war in order to unseat the recently established Islamic Republic of Iran, to maintain the dominance of Sunni Muslims, his own sect, over the majority Shi‘a Muslims in Iraq, and to assert his own primacy in the Arab world. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, insisted on continuing the war even after evicting Iraqi troops from Iranian territory, for the purpose of consolidating his revolution at home and extending it beyond Iran’s borders. These were not, perhaps, admirable goals and were not, for the most part, achieved, but because the two leaders pursued them doggedly, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, it seems odd to call the conflict “aimless.”
By contrast, the book’s explanation of the two most important and controversial features of the Cold War—its origins and its conclusion—are likely to stand the test of time. The defeat of Germany and the severe weakening of Great Britain and France in World War II left a vacuum of power in Europe, the heart of the international system. The United States and the Soviet Union filled it. They became competitors rather than cooperating with each other because of their strongly held and incompatible ideologies. The Cold War, as Westad emphasizes, was from the first a contest of contrasting political and economic systems. In the 1970s a revisionist interpretation of the origins of the conflict appeared in the West, which imputed the principal responsibility for it to the United States, the stronger of the two major adversaries, and implied that it could have been avoided. Westad rejects this interpretation. While he argues that the American side might have done more to moderate the conflict, particularly after the death of Stalin in 1953 when his successors seemed momentarily open to better relations with the West, he is clear that a conflict of some kind was all but inevitable.
If the vacuum of power in Europe made the Cold War possible and the opposing ideologies of the two sides rendered it unavoidable, a third feature of the world of the mid-20th century gave it its global scope: decolonization. The end of the European overseas empires, and Japan’s Asian empire as well, led to conflicts over what would replace them in which the two opposing camps became entangled. The two major wars that the United States waged in the second half of the 20th century had their roots in the retreat of imperial powers: that of Japan from Korea and that of France from Indochina.
As for the end of the Cold War, the reader of Westad’s book will learn that the conflict’s unexpected and almost miraculously peaceful conclusion also had three main causes. First and foremost, in the contest of systems one of the two contestants scored a clear victory. The economic trends of the last decades of the century enhanced the advantages of Western capitalism over communist central planning in producing economic well-being. The superiority of Western free markets, all the more obvious because they worked so well for non-Western countries, especially in East Asia, had something like the effect that the kind of military victory that neither side came close to achieving in the Cold War has in shooting wars: It delivered a clear victory to one of the two conflicting parties.
Still, the Soviet Union and its satellites could have muddled along for years even as the economic gap between them and the West widened. They did not do so, and communist rule in Europe ended instead, because of the policies of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In trying to revitalize the communist system he unintentionally set in motion the events that destroyed it. Westad portrays him as having become, by the end of his time in power, a kind of Western liberal. What made him such a consequential figure, however, was his singular and hardly common combination of three character traits: ignorance—he so little understood the empire over which he presided, for example, that he believed that the countries of Eastern Europe would willingly belong to a revived socialist commonwealth of his design; arrogance—he was convinced that he knew how to fix the multiple economic and political maladies that afflicted communism; and decency—at a number of points he could have stopped the disintegration of European communism by authorizing the use of force, but he didn’t.
Finally, the Cold Was ended because one of the two parties to it was subverted by the political power of nationalism. For the countries of Eastern Europe, their rejection of communist rule in 1989 was an act of national liberation. After 1991 the Balts and Ukrainians preferred national independence to membership in a larger, Russian-dominated political order. If inferior economic performance discredited the communist system, the force of national feeling tore apart the communist empire and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.
Nationalism as a major factor in international politics predated the Cold War, beginning, as it did, with the French Revolution of 1789. During the Cold War it worked, on the whole, to the advantage of the communist side. Although committed in each case to an ideology of global scope, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, the communists of Vietnam, and the militant clerics of Iran all succeeded in mobilizing nationalist sentiment in furtherance of their own ambitions and at the expense of the United States. Moreover, this form of political allegiance has persisted in the wake of the Cold War. Twenty-first-century Russia and China have abandoned orthodox communism, but nationalism is central to their domestic and foreign policies.
In this way nationalism is the great survivor of the era that Westad chronicles. The other principal causes of its beginning and its end now belong to the past. A vacuum of power in Europe, belief in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, the great multinational empires of the traditional great powers of Europe, the economic competition between free markets and central planning and the leaders of the Soviet Union—indeed the Soviet Union itself—can now be found only in books such as The Cold War, while nationalism goes marching on.