The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

This is by far the best book available about the Cold War in the Third World. I have been waiting for a good book on this subject for quite some time, and I was not disappointed. Westad starts out with a broad overview of American and Soviet history with particular emphasis on the importance of ideology and expansionism. He shows that the Cold War was primarily an ideological struggle between two powers that occurred at a time when when many new nations were coming into being due to European decolonialization. The two forces contributed to the radicalization and violence of the Third World in the Cold War. Westad does an excellent job of providing both wide scope and in-depth analysis of a number of conflicts. He covers Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Iran, Afghanistan and Central America. Unless you are an expert in all these conflicts, you are sure to learn something from this book. I am somewhat familiar with a few of them and found no major inaccuracies. And Westad does a great job of integrating them together into a tight narrative and argument. My only complaint is that the book ends with an argument against "intervention." After 400 pages of explaining why past interventions were so important to the direction of modern history, it seems a bit of a contradiction to the rest of the book. But this is just a tiny criticism of an otherwise great book.

This fine book is devoted to a hugely important topic typically neglected in most discussions of the Cold War; the course and impact of the Cold War in the Third World. Most overview monographs on the Cold War concentrate on US-Soviet relations and/or the impact of the Cold War in Europe and Japan. Westad successfully attempts an overview and structural analysis of the Cold War in the Third World. Westad opens with a pair of summary chapters on the USA and Soviet Union leading up to the beginning of the Cold War. He then covers the early decades of the Cold War in the Third World concisely, and devotes much of the book to the last 2 decades of the Cold War, including detailed analyses of the events in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Based on a wealth of secondary sources and analysis of primary literature from both US and Soviet archives, the narrative is comprehensive, clear, and punctuated with thoughtful analysis. There is a lot of surprising information. While many readers will be aware of US interventions in places like Guatemala and Iran, Westad's descriptions of the depth of US interventions in places like Indonesia and Brazil will come as a surprise. Similarly, his description of how the Soviet involvement in the Third World came to be seen as a crucial element of the legitimacy of the Soviet state goes a long way towards explaining why the events in Afghanistan had such importance. With respect to the battleground states of the various Third World countries where US and Soviet interventions took place, this is generally a series of tragic stories, usually involving considerable bloodshed and impoverishment. Westad goes considerably beyond good narrative. Several well articulated themes run through the narrative. A basic concept is that the Cold War was driven by two competing ideologies about what should be the basis of modern society - American liberal capitalism and Soviet communism. Westad is very good on how ideological considerations consistently drove US and Soviet policy decisions, including the many cases where ideology led to gross misunderstandings of reality. Another important theme is the independent role of local elites in Third World countries. Over and over again, these elites or portions of them sought superpower support to pursue their own ends, often quite different from those of the superpowers. This led, for example, to the depressingly frequent US support of brutal dictatorships and the Soviet support of regimes who suppressed local communist parties. Westad is very good as well at showing how the Cold War involvement of the superpowers was entangled with decolonialization, another important theme. Both the US and Soviet Union presented themselves as, and made serious efforts to act as, modernizers. In a series of particularly ironic developments, both US and Soviet policies often mimicked the development policies of the imperial states they displaced. My only substantial criticisms

Westad presents a disturbing but comprehensive and balanced evaluation of U.S. and Soviet policies towards Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia in the 1946-1991. His research is exhaustive, and his conclusions are cautionary for American interventionists in the post-Cold War era.

Westad's book offers a new interpretation of the second half of the twentieth century, one that focuses on how the conflict between the US and the USSR-- and the division of the world into two halves-- played out in the Third World, and shaped and was shaped by the politics of those regions. The first two chapters are fairly heavy going, as Westad lays out sweeping statements about first the US, then the USSR, arguing that both countries developed around ideas that committed them to an almost evangelical form of statehood, of exporting their way of life. As he moves into the middle of the book, however, the story really takes off; he offers well-informed, fascinating case studies ranging from Angola and Ethiopia to Iran and Afghanistan. In every case, he illuminates the way in which the US and USSR offered only two sides on the playing field, and how people in these Third World countries responded by playing the superpowers off one another. One of the central processes that he brings to light is the way in which this situation eventually encouraged the rise of sectarian movements in many of those countries, including fundamentalist Islam, which appears here as a natural development from a generation who had watched their predecessors cast in with one of the two superpowers, and end up pawns in a global chess game. After finishing this book, I felt that I had an entirely new perspective on American history in the 20th century and better understood current-day issues from the rise of Islam to American support for Israel to the politics of central Africa. Certainly NOT a light read, but an invaluable one.

From reading Westad's book it appears that the American loss in Vietnam actually led to the Soviets losing the Cold War. After the American defeat in Vietnam, the Soviets believed that they could ignore the popular front strategy that they used in Spain during the thirties and continued in Egypt and Indonesia, and replace it with a more revolutionary strategy that would abandon the popular front phase. This was the main reason they supported the revolutionary governments in Angola and Ethiopia. However wars in these African countries and Central America drained the Soviet economy. Finally the Soviets believed that they could prevent Afghanastan from falling to the competing revolutionary ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. Ths further led to financial and human losses for the Soviet Union and finally its collaspse. It is ironic after the Soviet loss in the Cold War the Americans find themselves blinded by triumphalism and committing serious mistakes in the Middle East and Latin America.