Latin America and the Global Cold War

The Cold War: A World History

With Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Tanya Harmer delivers a brilliant book that offers new and needed perspectives on the apex of the Latin American Cold War. This thorough biography of a prominent activist and key link within the multilayered regional Left expands far beyond the life of an individual and explores various Cold War patterns and dynamics. Owing to an extraordinary array of previously unconsulted primary sources, this book is a masterful example of how, by exploring one person's life and surroundings, researchers can scrutinize broader phenomena—in this case, “a particular revolutionary moment in Latin America's Cold War” (p. 16).A major asset of the book is Harmer's methodical examination of how the Eduardo Frei administration (1964–70) influenced the Chilean Left. There is a regrettable trend in Cold War historiography to disregard Chile's Christian Democratic experience, which fostered a “climate of reform and voluntarism” that had a strong impact on a younger generation of revolutionaries (p. 88). Frei's reformist agenda, which included rapprochement with the socialist sphere, helped set the scene for new patterns of mobilization and activated mounting hopes that forged a dynamic of radicalization by expectation. This concatenation had a lot to do with the rise and fate of Salvador Allende's socialist project. Thus while the Popular Unity period has received the bulk of academic attention, Harmer convincingly invites us to further delve into the years preceding it, in order to reveal those hard-to-grasp mechanisms that led to the growth of revolutionary awareness.A second major strength of this book is its incorporation of a gender approach across the entire volume. This approach demonstrates how decisive gendered political divisions were in determining (and stymieing) women's aspirations and political possibilities. The book probes episodes in both Chile and Cuba in which Beatriz Allende's ambitions were repeatedly hampered by well-entrenched, masculinist revolutionary imagery. This is aptly presented as evidence of how Latin American women were constrained in the political sphere.But despite these nearly insurmountable constraints, Allende played a pivotal role as key mediator among multiple revolutionary groups, often with clashing proclivities. She was able to navigate across several factions and managed—sometimes successfully—to build ties within the complex Latin American Left: among Cuban and Chilean officials under Salvador Allende, radical and moderate Chilean leftists, and local and exiled revolutionaries in Chile and Cuba. Far from simply an idiosyncrasy, Beatriz Allende's astounding ability to assume “different roles and personalities depending on the situation” contributed to shaping the hemispheric Left's progression (p. 104). By highlighting Allende's position as a bridge between factions—with constant and revealing illustrations of this peppered throughout the book—Harmer underscores the role of Cold War intermediaries and, by doing so, exposes why a transnational outlook is fundamental to a fuller picture of the Latin American Cold War.However, even though Harmer has long been a key proponent of the concept of the “global Cold War”—coined by her doctoral dissertation director, Odd Arne Westad—this book lacks a wider discussion of the appropriateness of a transnational history approach to Allende's biography. The book is punctuated with personal episodes of Allende's multifaceted and tormented life that exerted an impact on her political posture. While the book evinces both inner and transnational dynamics, it does not provide a broader debate on the main factors that ultimately played the greatest role in defining Allende's trajectory and, by extension, the nature of Latin America's Cold War. Can personal stories sometimes outshine global trends? Are people's political mobilization and choices molded by personal experiences? Or should we rather focus on the grand ideological narratives and developments? Harmer presumably has a clear answer to these queries, but a more straightforward discussion of this in the book would have been desirable in clarifying her intellectual approach.While the book certainly delivers an eloquently multidimensional view of the Left, the Right is barely considered for its ideological ramifications in the global Cold War. Undoubtedly Allende and her political entourage “faced terrible odds” in confronting “powerful, foreign-backed opponents” (p. 265). But beyond its repressive apparatus and sinister alliance with the United States, the Latin American Right, as Vanni Pettinà has pointed out, also had a political project, one that garnered significant support from the economic elite as well as large portions of the regional middle class. Harmer is well aware of this, but her depiction of the Right without its ideological distinctiveness (which ultimately motivated violence) is one slight flaw in an otherwise formidable and indispensable book for both contemporary Latin Americanist and Cold War experts.

In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the governments that wished to learn from Romania's experience were those of Bolivia and Argentina. Their representatives were invited to Bucharest for official visits or specialization courses. In the case of Argentina, the collaboration also stemmed from interwar encounters at international medical congresses between physicians of the two countries.This example of early exchanges between Romania and Latin American countries signals a broader research field that has recently emerged in Cold War studies: the multiple geographies of medical exchanges, mobilities, and conceptualizations in the 1945–1989 period. The volume edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López is an essential addition to the growing literature about the relationship between health care, the bipolarity of the Cold War, and decolonization. Along with other pioneering studies, such as those by Marcos Cueto (Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 2007), Young-Sun Hong (Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime, 2015), and Dora Vargha (Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic, 2018), the collection explores the fascinating terrain determined by the relationship between Cold War politics and rhetoric, on one hand, and notions of health, disease, and welfare, on the other.Peripheral Nerve brings two new dimensions to this scholarship. First, it offers a comprehensive panorama of Latin American cases of local, regional, and transregional alignments engineered by medical experts. It goes beyond the usual focus on U.S. interventions in and hegemony over this part of the world. The contributors convincingly emphasize the agency of Latin American actors, their ability to engage with multiple partners, and their savviness in taking advantage of the ideological competition between the two camps of the Cold War.Second, Peripheral Nerve brings a new chronological perspective for discussing health care entanglements, circulations, and partisanships: ideas, choices, and affinities during the Cold War were rooted in the interwar period. They are linked to the institutional and intellectual history of medical reforms in Latin America before 1945, to international experiences such as cooperation within the League of Nations Health Organization, or to the fascination with the Soviet Union's radical experiment in state-managed health care. Moreover, many of the contributors provide suggestive connections between pre-1989 policies and phenomena that unfolded after the end of the Cold War.The overarching theme of Peripheral Nerve is that of local agency and, consequently, of revising the history of the Cold War from its margins. Such an approach brings Latin America back into the global history of the period, a task flagged by other recent publications as well. For instance, in the introduction to the impressive volume Latin America and the Global Cold War, Thomas Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà affirm that they compiled the book to revive “the history of what were once powerful interactions between Latin America and the rest of the Global South” (p. 2).Peripheral Nerve opens with a foreword by Gilbert Joseph, who places the volume in the general trend of “remaking . . . Latin American Cold War history” (p. ix). Three sections follow, each with its own distinct vantage point. The first deals with the interplay between leftwing internationalism and U.S. pressure on Latin America during the early Cold War. Katherine Bliss examines the biography of Lini de Vries, a former U.S. antifascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who sought to elude the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation by going into exile to Mexico in the 1940s. The Mexican government welcomed her contribution to rural health care reform, despite encountering criticism from U.S. officials. Nicole Pacino shows how the shrill anti-Communism of the 1950s in Washington led to the politicization of the Rockefeller Foundation's grants to medical schools in Bolivia, a departure from the institution's more ecumenical approach before 1945. Gabriel Soto Laveaga offers a fascinating study of how U.S. pharmaceutical companies skillfully employed Cold War rhetoric to control international prices and exert pressure on the Mexican government to open up its steroid hormone industry. If in the early 1950s a Mexico City company, Syntex Laboratories, controlled much of the world's steroid trade, by the end of the decade U.S. investors had purchased Syntex and relocated its headquarters to Palo Alto, significantly diminishing Mexico's domestic pharmaceutical capacities. In these three cases one can observe the degrees to which Latin American governments were able to maneuver in the increasingly troubled waters of U.S.-Soviet competition.The second section of the volume deals with the circulation of ideas and experts within the ideological camps of the Cold War. Each contribution underlines levels of ideological adaptation and transfer in various Latin American countries. Raúl Necochea López analyses how fertility surveys in Puerto Rico were the basis for U.S. advocacy of family planning policies throughout Latin America. He insists that this process antagonized Puerto Rican nationalists who used the Cold War to consolidate their position on the island. Gilberto Hochman and Carlos Herinque Paiva present the intellectual and ideological itinerary of parasitologist Samuel Pessoa. They link his fascination with Communist states’ health care systems (from the Soviet Union or China) and his membership in the Brazilian Communist Party to his interwar advocacy for medical, social, and economic reforms in the Brazilian countryside. The chapter provides glimpses into the multifaceted Latin American engagements with “socialized medicine.” From 1956 to 1961, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek emphasized state centralization and planning of programs for the control and eradication of rural endemic diseases (p. 151). Jennifer Lambe examines the evolution of psychiatry in Cuba from the perspective of debates pitting Sigmund Freud against Nikolai Pavlov as central paradigms of the profession. She stresses the prerevolutionary roots of these discussions. She insists on the eclecticism, particularly in the 1960s, of Cuban responses to official attempts to emulate the Soviet focus on the Pavlovian tradition. She also shows how the two Soviet psychiatrists sent to Havana to advise on the revolutionary reform of the discipline had to acknowledge the diversity of local approaches (pp. 172–173).The third section is centered on the multidirectionality of Latin American medical experiences throughout the Cold War. Jadwiga Mooney focuses on two biographies—those of Salvador Allende and Benjamin Viel—when recounting Chilean attempts to create a national health service. For both men, Mooney emphasizes the pre-1945 origins of their reformist projects as well as the role of other health care models, such as the British or the Soviet, in shaping their visions of the Chilean medical system. Marco Ramos's chapter explores Argentinian psychoanalysts’ syncretic interactions and cross-fertilizations with Soviet, Western, and Third Worldist approaches in the field. These exchanges pushed some professionals to call in the 1970s for the “nationalization” of psychiatry so that it would better reflect Argentine realities. Ramos shows the shifting meaning of anti-imperialism and its embeddedness in the local context. This sometimes caused “failed encounters” (desencuentros) between strands of anticolonial medicine (p. 212). Cheasty Anderson contributes a study of Cuban medical teams’ activity in Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime. The Cuban government sought to insulate its medical workers from Nicaraguan society, beyond their medical provision tasks. Nicaraguan officials likewise safeguarded their policymaking autonomy. Anderson offers an engrossing analysis of daily contacts between Cuban personnel and the Nicaraguan population, but she does not fully explore the potential hierarchies of this interaction, particularly the Cuban superiority complex that sometimes appears between the lines of her interviewees’ accounts. Anderson could have also pursued a comparison between Cuban activities and East German doctors’ experience at the Carlos Marx hospital, created and operated by the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. Iris Borowy has written a captivating account of this medical institution in the journal História, ciências, saúde—Manguinhos (2017). Peripheral Nerve would have benefited from a more comparative exploration connecting Latin American experiences with other instances of medical entanglement and circulation in different regions during the Cold War.Peripheral Nerve ends with a conclusion by the two editors that discusses the new vistas for research on health, medicine, and the Cold War in Latin America. The linchpin for the issues they raise is the central role played by international institutions (e.g., the World Health Organization or United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) in global health care dynamics. These bodies offered world forums for various governments and their experts to pursue their interests, engage in dialogue, and imagine their positions in international political and medical hierarchies. Birn and López also explore the continuities across the 1989 threshold, underlining that the end of the Cold War did not bring “a wholesale rebooting of health philosophies and proposals in Latin America, instead hosting a mingling of the old and the new” (p. 272). They connect medical solidarities across the region during the post-2000 Pink Tide of elected left-leaning governments with programs first established during the Cold War. For instance, they show how the 2005 PAHO Declaration of Montevideo revived the primary health care principles of the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978), and they point out that the Cuban-Venezuelan Misión Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood) was an offspring of Havana's pre-1989 medical diplomacy. In this last case, they should have stressed the blatant manipulation of the program by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to ensure his and his party's reelection, as detailed for instance in extensive reporting by Nicholas Casey in The New York Times in March 2019.The volume edited by Birn and López is a trailblazing contribution to the global history of medicine during the Cold War. It presents geographies and expertise that recapture the complex connections pursued from Latin America, which equally echoed and defied ideological divides during the second half of the 20th century. Such versatile reading of international health care politics is highly topical for the present: the COVID pandemic has reopened debates about medical diplomacy, competition among health care models, and vaccine nationalism.

Global Cold War - Latin America and the Global Cold War. Edited by Thomas C. Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 422. $39.95 cloth. - Volume 78 Issue 4

Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 484 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. Why did the United States and the Soviet Union intervene so often in the affairs of distant, impoverished "third world" nations during the Cold War? It is a question that historians of international relations have sought to answer for many years, reaching back into the early stages of the Cold War itself. In the 1950s, the conventional wisdom among American historians held that both sides were driven by ideas—a noble dedication to liberty and self-determination on the U.S. side and a fiendish determination to dominate and indoctrinate on the other. Only with the publication of William Appleman Williams's seminal The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy in 1959, did scholarship move in a new direction. Americans asserted power in less-developed regions, argued Williams, not to uphold principle but to serve the interests of the U.S. economy by securing markets and raw materials. Additional interpretive possibilities have opened up more recently, with scholars highlighting geostrategic calculation, racism, political and bureaucratic imperatives, or personal proclivities of key policymakers to explain superpower behavior on the global periphery.1 In The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, the Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad brings us full circle with a monumental new master narrative of the Cold War in the third world. Westad makes no bones about it: Ideology drove both the United States and the Soviet Union to intervene repeatedly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America despite the frustration, bloodshed, political turmoil, and damaging diversions of resources that their adventures usually brought them. More specifically, argues Westad, each superpower—one wedded to democratic capitalism, the other to communism—viewed itself as the quintessential embodiment of modernity and therefore as the nation best suited to the task of bringing progress to the rest of humanity. "Locked in conflict over the very concept of European modernity—to which both states regarded themselves as successors—Washington and Moscow needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies, and the elites of the newly independent states proved fertile [End Page 385] ground for their competition," Westad contends. "Both saw a specific mission in and for the Third World that only their own state could carry out and which without their involvement would flounder in local hands" (p. 4). To be sure, Westad breaks in at least one key respect with the earlier generation of authors who put ideology at the center of the story. While the older scholarship celebrated U.S. motives and castigated the Soviets, Westad condemns both in equal measure. For him, both superpowers were, despite the contrasting content of their ideologies, remarkably alike in their motives and in their impacts on the areas where they intervened. Each arrogantly championed itself as the culmination of human progress. And each, by arming its third-world surrogates and imbuing their conflicts with high purpose, fueled grueling wars that took devastating human and economic tolls. Westad even suggests a parallel in the ultimate consequences of the superpowers' behavior in the third world. The Soviet Union crumbled in part because of its missteps in Afghanistan, where it was defeated by Islamist guerrillas in the 1980s. Resentments caused by U.S. behavior in the Muslim world during and after the Cold War might yield the same result for the United States, warns Westad, who proposes that the September 11 attacks mark just the beginning of attempts by the world's "impoverished majority" to turn the tables on Western nations with a long track record of meddling in their affairs. "Without a genuine reorientation of its foreign policy, American democracy may end up suffering the same fate as Soviet socialism," he concludes (p. 406). The Global Cold War is thus a deeply provocative book that will engage—and possibly enrage—scholars with...

The following paper aims to contribute to the study of the Global Cold War and western interventionism in the so-called Third-World countries. Specifically, it explores the role of the Federal Republic of Germany, as a Western Bloc actor, in its bilateral relations with Paraguay under the Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989), one of the longest and most repressive regimes in Latin America. Moreover, this study analyses the impact of the Global Cold War in the contemporary system of global governance and international order. The ideological and political dimensions of the Cold War, compounded with its military, economic and cultural confrontations, opened a window onto the rise of West-Germany as a prominent actor in international relations. An exploration of the case of its relations with Paraguay helps to achieve a broader understanding of how Third-World actors increased the spectrum of the conflict to a global level. By engaging in the study of this case within a historical perspective, this article aspires to stimulate a new analysis of the Federal Republic (FRG) interventions within the binarism of the Global Cold War. This study focuses on how bilateral relations between the FRG and Paraguay, inserted into the arena of a global iron curtain, were shaped by anti-communist discourses and oriented towards economic goals. The latter were pursued through development projects and strategies to achieve industrialization in Third-World countries. In this context, this paper explores the technical and financial aid provided to support development and modernization in several economic sectors.

This themed issue of The Journal of Architecture focuses on what appears to be a major blind-spot of current architectural historiography of the post-war period: the transfer of architecture and pl...

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

This article analyses the frequently neglected synergies, past and present, between community-oriented policing (COP) and community-centred military interventions in Latin America. From the vantage point of Brazilian pacification efforts, from the Global Cold War to the Global War on Terror, it is argued that COP is a transnational security governance rationale that emerged during the Global Cold War out of the discovery of the ‘community’ as a key target for military interventions seeking to counter the presence of non-state armed actors challenging state authority. This underlying logic survived the end of the Cold War, including in Latin America. In the post-9/11 context COP efforts returned to their militarized Cold War origins, when local security bureaucracies (re)discovered the usefulness of engaging with local communities in order to confront challenges to state power from non-stated armed actors, such as gangs and drug traffickers. This argument will be elaborated through an analysis of on one of the most recent Latin American COP ‘success stories’: the pacification programme operating in Rio de Janeiro since 2008. Drawing on historical and contemporary policy documents, as well as multi-sited empirical fieldwork, the transnational historical entanglements of domestic and external pacification experiences will be highlighted, allowing us to point towards the negative potentials of militarising COP efforts in regards to the inclusiveness of democratic security governance.

Latin America is usually regarded as a minor theatre of the Cold War because of the tight grip of the United States on its »backyard«. Although the field of Global Cold War Studies has emphasized the importance to extend the analytical view to the so-called Third World during this period, there are only few Latin American examples which receive attention. This paper advocates for a fresh look at the regime of Juan Peron in Argentina in the context of the Global Cold War. In the early phase of the superpower confrontation, Peron warned about a clash of capitalism and communism and in 1947 proclaimed a Third Position between the two superpowers. Although the Argentine government guaranteed the US to be on its side in case of a future war, Washington considered this Third Position an obstacle to its hemispheric policy. An analysis of the Third Position can help us get a broader perspective on the early phase of the Cold War in Latin America.

Shifting Perspectives on the Cold War Corinna R. Unger Lorenz M. Lüthi, Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe. 756 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108407069. $34.99. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, historians interested in the conflict face both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to find new angles in a field that has been studied for decades and with high intensity, to critically deal with the epistemological legacies of historical research produced under Cold War conditions, and to define what "Cold War history" means at a time when the field has branched out in a variety of directions.1 The opportunity is to break free from older views anchored in ideological debates of the pre-1989 period and to develop fresh perspectives that benefit from and contribute to developments in other fields, especially global history and his new international history. One of the most influential publications in this regard has been Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War, which was decisive in turning the gaze from Europe to parts of the world that, until then, had been considered merely venues in which the superpowers competed with each other. The Cold War term "proxy wars" captured this older view—which, by and large, denied any kind of agency to countries, governments, and people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.2 Lorenz M. Lüthi's new book presents a continuation of the effort to decenter the history of the Cold War. Lüthi does so by offering an account of regional Cold War conflicts as they played out in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe and by investigating what he calls the "connections and spillover effects within" those three regions (2). The book consists of seven parts. The [End Page 181] first part, on "elusive unities," looks at the relations of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union with the Arab League, the "Free World," and the socialist countries, respectively, from the 1940s to the 1980s. This is followed by a section in which the regional conflicts in Asia and the Middle East are covered in one part each. The parts deal with the place of Europe between the superpowers; European détente; and, finally, with the "end of the regional Cold Wars." Lüthi's aim is to challenge the traditional interpretation of the Cold War as a conflict between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and as having taken place predominantly on the European continent. He argues that this interpretation is misleading in that it ignores the developments in other parts of the world—trends that cannot just be dismissed as derivatives of the superpower Cold War. Among the most important of these processes are decolonization and the emergence of independent nation-states in Asia and the Middle East, which have often been presented as taking place in parallel to the Cold War rather than preceding and shaping it. By paying close attention to the histories of these regions as such, rather than treating them as satellites whose histories were shaped by Moscow or Washington, Lüthi makes an effective argument about the need to rethink not only the geographical center but also the chronology of the Cold War. As an effect of Lüthi's shift in focus and his attention to "structural change at the regional and national levels, and to horizontal connections among different world regions" (1), the image of a singular, homogenous Cold War is replaced by an interpretation that highlights the pluralistic, heterogeneous nature of the conflict. In this context, the author demonstrates how in many cases existing political and economic conflicts between neighboring countries, ethnic factions, or religious groups contributed to and got caught up in Cold War dynamics but were not the result of the Cold War. This is perhaps the most important achievement of the book: it convincingly challenges the traditional account of the Cold War as a conflict determined and defined by the two superpowers, demonstrating that the Cold War was inextricably tied to events in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe that existed independently of the Cold War but...

Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America’s forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region’s past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America’s ongoing political struggles.

Meeting the Challenge from Totalitarianism: The Tennessee Valley Authority as a Global Model for Liberal Development, 1933–1945

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)