Everywhere the Cold War

Abstract

Everywhere the Cold War Jason Parker (bio) Odd Arne Westad. The Cold War: A World History. New York: Basic Books, 2017. 710 pp. Notes, index. $40.00. It has become increasingly common at conferences to hear scholars musing about the historiographical staying power of the Cold War. Although seemingly all-consuming and all-defining to the generations of historians whose careers unfolded within it, the four-decade conflict between superpowers has begun to recede into our intellectual horizons. Other contemporaneous currents—globalization, economic flux, religious fervor, nationalism, and nativism, to name a few—seem, with the benefit of hindsight, to hold greater significance than we previously appreciated, and greater longevity going forward. The Cold War's power to shape societal and world affairs thus can appear in retrospect quite overblown. The decades-long battle among scholars of U.S.-International history over the origins of the conflict is telling in this regard. Once well-known by those preparing for doctoral exams in U.S. history, the triumvirate of Orthodox/Revisionist/Post-Revisionist schools of thought is no longer standard fare. Revisionist avatar William Appleman Williams, for example, seems to have dropped off most reading lists. Yet perhaps the real surprise is that those schools lingered for as long as they did. This itself suggests the extent to which scholarly understanding of postwar history centered on an East-West Cold War. The nuclear threat, understandably, concentrated the collective mind. Non-East-West actors tended either not to appear or did so as mere victims of superpower malfeasance in their midst, as in Korea and Vietnam. The ideological clash itself was 1945–1989, or at most 1917–1991. What John Lewis Gaddis calls the "long peace" was in this view the central postwar story, obscuring all others when it was not commandeering them.1 Odd Arne Westad endorses an East-West centrality while slyly moving the literature beyond it. The Cold War: A World History takes a god's-eye view of time and space to affix the superpower conflict within a longer timeline and a worldwide frame. Westad positions it as unfolding "within the context of two processes of deep change in international politics: [the] emergence of new states [and] the emergence of the United States as the dominant global power" [End Page 645] (p. 7). The Cold War occupied the latter decades of a century-long interplay of reformist political ideologies, the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from the Columbian to the post-Columbian atlas. This reading elevates the Cold War above its role as primarily a struggle for mastery of Eurasia, or a nuclear standoff, or a spark for bloody violence far and wide. It was of course all of those, and other, things. But Westad ingeniously, artfully, and convincingly encourages us to place the conflict in a broader compass. In this he is continuing the contribution of his Bancroft-prizewinning The Global Cold War, which lifted the Cold War out of its European ground-zero and re-centered it in the global South. In this account, global-North military interventions helped to spark the rise of the "Third World" nations whose citizens saw them as a continuation of a half-millennium of "pan-European" expansion and dominance. Scholars continue to debate the relative role of military incursions in shaping North-South relations, as compared to those of a more economic, cultural, or political bent. But The Global Cold War was nonetheless vital in a wholly salutary development in the literature: recasting the conflict from East-West to North-South, from superpower-centric to multivalent. The Cold War thereby shifts from being the default framework for postwar international history to being one of several major phenomena within it. The present book argues for the Cold War's continued centrality, while obliging it to again share the stage. Among other implications, this underlines that the relevant actors were not solely American or Soviet (or Chinese) agents provocateurs sneaking around global-South powder kegs striking matches, conniving and cajoling among their gullible victims. The cast also very much included global-South players too. The "discovery" of their agency—"retiring the puppets," as Max Paul Friedman puts it—is central to revising...