60 | NEW REPUBLIC
REVIEW
BOOKS
“CONSIDERING HOW LIKELY we all are to be blown to pieces
by it within the next five years,” George Orwell wrote in late
1945, “the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion
as might have been expected.” Orwell was grappling with the
political implications of the new weapon, about two months
after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more
than 100,000 people. If atomic bombs were cheap to build, he
thought, they might level differences in power between nations.
But since the costs of production were so high, he anticipated
instead the creation of only a few atomic superstates. In fact,
Orwell reasoned, the atomic bomb might actually serve to
intensify political inequality,
by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to
revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb
on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another,
they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and
it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow
and unpredictable demographic changes.
It was a situation of “cold war,” he wrote, in one of the first
uses of the phrase. And, he concluded, “it is likelier to put an
end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely
a ‘peace that is no peace.’ ”
Orwell’s imaginings eventually took him to the world he
fictionalized in 1984, but his analysis of the coming Cold War
proved cogent. Only a few countries gained atomic weapons.
Hostile powers, principally the United States and the Soviet
Union, did not attack each other directly, fearing mutual destruction.
They did, however, develop semipermanent war
economies, as they vied for influence in countries across the
world. What came to be called the “Third World” experienced
these power struggles as a continuation of European imperialism.
The Cold War, as it was fought in Korea, in Indonesia,
in Cuba and Chile and Angola, was hardly “cold.” It did not ILLUSTRATION BY GUY BILLOUT
Cold War World
A new history redefines the conflict’s
true extent and enduring costs.
BY PATRICK IBER
entirely rob people of the power to revolt, but it certainly
constrained political choice and limited sovereignty.
Despite its global scale, historians of the Cold War tended
to focus on diplomatic decision-making in the U.S. and the
USSR. Since the beginning of Cold War studies, two basic
schools of thought contended to define the narrative. The first
school, based in the United States and essentially nationalist,
held that Stalin was primarily responsible for the conflict.
His was an evil, totalitarian regime that America was morally
bound to oppose. Herbert Feis and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
both of whom had worked for the U.S. government, set down
these lines of analysis in the 1950s and ’60s. This “orthodox”
interpretation has never really disappeared: The opening of
Soviet and Chinese archives in the 1990s brought renewed
focus on Stalin’s paranoia. The Cold War’s end with the apparent
victory of the United States and liberal capitalism gave
the orthodox view a boost, in works like John Lewis Gaddis’s
2006 history, The Cold War.
The second school of thought, almost as old, is critical of
American behavior rather than Soviet actions. In this “revisionist”
interpretation, blame for the conflicts of the Cold War lies
with capitalism and its defenders. America’s need to restore
global markets after World War II, and to control the extraction
of natural resources, led it to encroach on Soviet defenses.
America assumed it would emerge from the war as the dominant
global power, and in its efforts to engineer that outcome
created the Cold War. William Appleman Williams pioneered
this interpretation in 1959. It rose in influence during the
Vietnam War and can still be seen, for example, in the writings
of Noam Chomsky. To simplify enormous and complex bodies of
scholarship to their barest essences, orthodoxy held communism
primarily responsible, while revisionism blamed capitalism.
But the Cold War, as Orwell foresaw, would reach far beyond
the two principal actors. While historians have been pushing
beyond the “orthodox” and “revisionist” binary for some time,
it is Odd Arne Westad, a professor at Harvard University’s
Kennedy School of Government, who has most successfully
constructed an account of the Cold War that is truly global in
its scope. In his Bancroft Prize–winning book, The Global Cold
War, published in 2005, Westad contended that the conflict
shaped the internal politics of every country in the world.
Any advance for U.S. interests, no matter how far-flung, was
seen as a setback for Soviet interests, and vice versa. For many
countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the Cold War
heralded the final stage of European colonial control. 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.S. or the USSR. 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
NOVEMBER 2017 | 61
REVIEW
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. It also
arrives at a moment when we must grasp the dynamics of the
Cold War if we want to understand some of today’s most urgent
developments, from North Korea’s acquisition of long-range
nuclear missiles to the rise of socialist movements in Western
democracies. Although the Cold War is receding into the
past—roughly half the world’s population is too young to have
memories of it—we are still living in its shadow and trying to
discover the possibilities created by its end.
UNLIKE A SHOOTING WAR, with an opening battle and a closing
treaty, the Cold War’s beginning and end have always been
shrouded in mist. There is general agreement that it started
between 1945 and 1948, and ended between 1989 and 1991.
Tensions ran especially high from the end of World War II in
1945 to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, then relaxed somewhat,
only to rebound in the 1980s. 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 1917. In this sense, Westad’s concept of
the conflict mirrors what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm
described as the “short twentieth century”—the period, lasting
from 1914 to 1991, marked by global competition between
capitalist and communist states. In Westad’s view, capitalism
and communism presented two opposing visions of modernity,
each rooted in the transformation in the early twentieth
century of the United States and Russia into empires with
international missions:
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.
With its early start date and its focus on
ideology, Westad’s new history of the
Cold War follows many familiar beats,
but includes some unexpected fills. Cooperation
between the United States and
the Soviet Union during World War II,
never carried out with much trust, deteriorated into postwar
conflict as the USSR expected capitalism to experience a crisis,
and America feared the same. Tensions heightened as the
United States attempted to contain Soviet expansion, and
the USSR constructed a defensive perimeter in Eastern Europe.
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 1947 and in Italy in 1948. Meanwhile, the dictators
and military governments that the United States propped up
in Greece and Spain burnished their “democratic” credentials
by appealing to anti-communism.
Throughout the emerging “Third World,” by contrast, the
United States allowed governments very little leeway to experiment
with even non-Communist paths to social democracy. In
1953 and 1954, 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 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled
into Budapest.
In this, Orwell’s predictions of the nature of Cold War
conflict were imperfect. In general, the superpowers did not
threaten poorer countries with nuclear annihilation: They
simultaneously courted them in a battle for allegiance and
undercut efforts at reform that threatened the superpowers’
interests. Some of our present global inequalities, as well as
the political instability of poorer countries, can be ­attributed
THE COLD WAR: A
WORLD HISTORY
BY ODD ARNE WESTAD
Basic Books, 720pp.,
$40.00
NOVEMBER 2017 | 63
REVIEW
We are still living in the shadow
of the Cold War and trying to
discover the possibilities created
by its end.
64 | NEW REPUBLIC
HOWARDSOCHUREK/THELIFEPICTURECOLLECTION/GETTY
to Cold War ­superpowers forcefully
vetoing attempts by the
world’s poorer nations to solve
their national problems through
democratic means.
BY DEFINING THE Cold War so
widely, both geographically and
chronologically, Westad invites
questions about what the “war”
does and does not encompass.
Surely not everything between 1917
and 1991 can be described as the
result of the Cold War; that period,
after all, includes the World War II
alliance between the U.S. and the
USSR. Nor did all historically significant
changes that occurred in
the period of the “high” Cold War
after 1945—such as the destruction
of European empires and the proliferation
of postcolonial states—
directly result from the conflict.
But Westad’s argument might be
summarized by insisting that the
Cold War needs to be understood
as a struggle for hegemony, not just
power. 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. But
in other cases, such as Vietnam, a French colony until 1945—
America simply took over colonial projects from weakened
European allies. The Soviet Union, for its part, generally lined
up behind forces of national liberation (except in its sphere of
influence), if only because they had the potential to undermine
its rival. Some countries, like India, tried to reject Cold War
politics altogether, mixing democratic elections with economic
planning and formally establishing the Non-Aligned Movement
in 1961. Decolonization, in short, was not specifically a Cold
War phenomenon, but the way it played out in many countries
was certainly shaped by Cold War tensions.
In a work as sweeping as The Cold War, even major events
and controversies get passed over relatively quickly. But
Westad brilliantly reduces topics that have generated books
upon books to their most essential qualities. Take the question
of the extent to which U.S. foreign policy was designed to
­protect ­capitalism. When the CIA overthrew the government
of Guatemala in 1954, for example, was the agency doing the
bidding of the United Fruit Company, the U.S. corporation
whose holdings were being confiscated? Or did it fear that
Communists, who had gained administrative and advisory
roles in Guatemala’s new government, were building up too
much power in America’s sphere of influence? Westad argues
that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy was not the defense
of particular American companies and their interests, but
a much larger project: “the expansion of capitalism” itself,
which would “promote access to raw materials and future
markets for the United States and its allies.” To this end,
America was willing to sacrifice short-term economic interests
and the defense of particular companies; soon after the CIA
staged its coup in Guatemala, for example, United Fruit was
subjected to antitrust rulings at home.
Cold War tensions, though reduced in the 1970s, rose again
in the 1980s. But they did so against a background of continued
consumer shortages in the Soviet sphere. (There are a few
decent Communist jokes in the book: “A woman walks into
a food store. ‘Do you have any meat?’ ‘No, we don’t.’ ‘What
about milk?’ ‘We only deal with meat. The store where they
REVIEW
Khrushchev and Nixon, 1959. Earlier histories of the Cold War tended to overlook its global scale.
NOVEMBER 2017 | 65
have no milk is across the street.’ ”) At the same time, economic
recovery in the capitalist world, combined with increasingly
globalized telecommunications, advertised the West’s advantages
far more effectively than any propaganda. Soviet reforms
intended to open up the Communist system instead brought it
down. For the people of the Soviet bloc, it really was a moment
of liberation. But for who else, and for how long?
IF THE COLD WAR has a weakness, it’s simply that it adds little
to its groundbreaking predecessor, and lacks some of the older
work’s most thrilling analysis. Published in 2005, The Global
Cold War was deeply entwined with the idea that the conflict
was fundamentally ideological. It devoted two brilliant opening
chapters to explaining the self-conception of the major players.
America’s vision centered on a belief in personal liberty,
inseparable from private property, and a skepticism toward
centralized power; while the Soviet Union’s vision was based
on a rejection of the market. Each side believed that following
its model would better humanity.
This reading of the Cold War reflected its own ideologically
embattled times: Four years after the attacks of September 11,
and near the peaks of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
United States was once again embroiled in a conflict that it
presented as an ideological clash, this time between Western
liberalism and “radical” Islam. The rhetoric of the “war on
terror” wasn’t just an analog to the rhetoric of the Cold War: It
allowed the United States to continue pursuing a neocolonial
agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia. Westad reminds
the reader that September 11 was a form of foreign intervention
in the West—a reversal of the traditional pattern, and one that
was likely to continue into the future.
If there has been a shift in Westad’s reading of the Cold War
since 2005, it is toward the view that the West won because
it was materially, not ideologically, stronger. The battle was
waged over great ideas, but it was won on the fields of production
statistics. It was capitalism’s ability to outpace Soviet
growth at key junctures that made ideological victory possible.
Certainly Westad’s subtle shift in emphasis makes sense in
our era of heightened inequality and growing anxieties about
capitalism’s stability. It used to be heterodox and radical to
argue that the prosecution of the Cold War was underpinned
by America’s desire to spread capitalism: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
described William Appleman Williams as a “pro-Communist
scholar” for his critiques of U.S. diplomacy. But if you take
REVIEW
The war was waged over great ideas,
but it was won, Westad argues, on
the fields of production statistics.
NOVEMBER 2017 | 67
Westad’s long view, it’s clear that the Cold War was always
defined by the struggle between capitalism and communism
to allocate global resources. This perspective makes the old
orthodox and revisionist debates about “who started it” in the
1940s seem just that: old.
The victory of American capitalism over Soviet communism
did not, however, bring an end to the struggle over the
global distribution of wealth. Among U.S. allies, those who
conformed to American conceptions of free markets did not
fare equally. It was a bargain that worked out relatively well for
Western Europe, as well as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
But it didn’t work out well for most postcolonial nations, or
for most post-Soviet states, where living standards fell along
with the Soviet Union. As the USSR dissolved, a kind of market
messianism led the United States to overlook the complexities
of postwar planning. It would do the same again in places like
Iraq and Afghanistan, which it expected to be able to remake
in its own image. The Cold War has ended, but this kind of
hubris remains.
At the same time, the end of the Cold War has left us with a
range of new political possibilities. The Cold War engaged the
United States in a struggle between capitalism and socialism
around the globe, while suppressing it strenuously at home.
But nearly 30 years later, popular support for socialism is
emerging as a serious political force in the West. A 2016 survey
found that only 42 percent of millennials in the United States
said they supported capitalism, versus 51 percent who say
they reject it. Many young Americans today feel no visceral
connection to the Cold War equation of capitalism-as-­freedom.
What form the socialism of the future will take, if any, remains
the subject of intense political struggle. But it will be
worked out in a fundamentally post–Cold War environment,
in which the nightmarish aspects of Soviet communism no
longer exist—either as a bogeyman to be used to suppress the
left, or as a goad to inspire capitalism to defensive reforms.
The political terrain has changed dramatically, opening up a
space for ideas and movements that were unthinkable in the
paranoia of an earlier era.
Westad, like any good historian, is aware that his analysis
of the past is situated in its own place in history. He wonders
whether future scholars may de-emphasize the Cold War as
the most notable feature of the second half of the twentieth
century, in favor of the economic rise of Asia, or some other
historical development we have yet to recognize. One likely
candidate, as seen from the present, is the climate change that
imperils humanity’s future. In their competition for resources,
neither the Soviet Union nor the United States bothered to
take care of the environment; but because capitalism won,
it will be held responsible for the adverse consequences of
its success. Even if historians of the future find other aspects
of the twentieth century more important than those that we
emphasize today, they too will be grappling with the complex
legacies of the Cold War. Perhaps they will see it as that time
in the twentieth century when human beings whistled past
one graveyard while digging another. a
REVIEW
THE NEW REPUBLIC (ISSN 0028-6583), Vol. 248, No. 11, Issue 5,008, November
2017. Published monthly (except for two double issues of Jan/Feb and Aug/Sep 2017) by
TNR II, LLC, 1620 L Street NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036. Telephone (202)
508-4444. Back issues, $8.00 domestic and $10.00 Canada/int’l (includes postage and
handling). © 2017 by TNR II, LLC. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. and
additional mailing offices. For reprints, rights and permissions, please visit: www.
TNRreprints.com. Postmaster: Send changes of address to THE NEW REPUBLIC, P.O. Box
6387, Harlan, IA 51593-1887. Canadian Subscriptions: Canada Post Agreement Number
7178957. Send changes of address information and blocks of undeliverable copies to IBC,
7485 Bath Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 4C1, Canada. Send letters and unsolicited
manuscripts to letters@tnr.com. Poetry submissions must be emailed to poetry@tnr.com.
For subscription inquiries or problems, call (800) 827-1289, or visit our web site at
newrepublic.com/customer-service.
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP,
MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
1. Publication Title: THE NEW REPUBLIC 2. Publication number: 382-020 3.
Filing Date: October 1, 2017 4. Issue Frequency: Monthly, with 2 double issues
published. Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 6. Annual Subscription Price:
$79.97 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: The New
Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 8. Complete
Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Offices of Publisher: The
New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 9. Full
Names and Complete Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor:
Publisher: Hamilton Fish, The New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW Suite 300C,
Washington, D.C. 20036 Editor: Eric Bates: The New Republic, 1620 L Street,
NW, Suite 300C, Washington, D.C. 20036 Managing Editor: Laura Reston, The
New Republic, 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C, Washington D.C. 20036 10.
Owner: TNR II, LLC 1620 L Street, NW, Suite 300C Washington, D.C. 20036 11.
Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding
1% Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities:
None 12. Tax status: n/a 13. Publication Title: THE NEW REPUBLIC 14. Issue
Date for Circulation Data Below: October 2017 15. Extent and nature of circulation:
Average No. of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 months: a. Total
number of copies (Net press run): 42,906 b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside
the Mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form
3541: 27,049 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541:
0 (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and
Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside
USPS: 1,882 (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 0
c. Total Paid Distribution: 28,932 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail
and Outside the Mail): (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included
on PS Form 3541: 5,660 (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies included on
PS Form 3541: 0 (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through
the USPS: 0 (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or
other means): 1,033 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 6,693 f. Total
Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e): 35,624 g. Copies not Distributed: 7,282 h.
Total (sum of 15f and g): 42,906 i. Percent Paid (15c/15f x 100): 81.2% No. Copies
of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: a. Total number of copies
(Net press run) : 44,837 b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail): (1)
Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 27,871 (2).
Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 0 (3) Paid Distribution
Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street
Vendors, Counter Sales and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 2,155 (4) Paid
Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS: 0 c. Total Paid Distribution:
30,026 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the
Mail) (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541:
5,710(2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0
(3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS: 0
(4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means):
1,949 e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 7,659 f. Total Distribution (Sum
of 15c and 15e): 37,685 g. Copies not Distributed: 7,152 h. Total (sum of 15f & g):
44,837 i. Percent Paid (15c/15f x 100): 79.7% 16. Total circulation includes electronic
copies. 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: November 2017 18. I
certify that all information on this form is true and complete. I understand that
anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits
material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions
(including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil
penalties) (signed) David Myer, Controller, October 1, 2017
Copyright of New Republic is the property of TNR II, LLC and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express
written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.