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Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War
Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. In Uncertain Empire , a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points--diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion--highlighting the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American
invention. Uncertain Empire brings debates over national, global, and transnational history into focus and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the field.
invention. Uncertain Empire brings debates over national, global, and transnational history into focus and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the field.
302 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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May 6, 2014
Two key historiographical questions lie at the heart of this first-rate collection of essays on the American experience of the Cold War, edited by the superb young intellectual historian of the Cold War Joel Isaac as well as another collaborator. The first question has to do with the periodization of the phenomenon known as the Cold War. The second critical question has to with how the impact of the Cold War (however periodized) ramified out from the political and ideological struggle between politicians in Moscow and Washington to affect broader social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena in American life.
The first question, of periodization, is addressed directly in the pair of papers by Anders Stephanson and Odd Arne Westad that open the beautifully curated but poorly title Uncertain Empire. Building on his pathbreaking work in the 1990s on the genealogy of the idea of “cold war,” Stephanson engages in a broad interrogation and indictment of the slipperiness of the term and the comitant sloppiness with which it has been applied to refer to virtually all aspects of international relations between 1945 and 1989 that can plausibly be construed as having to do with Superpower rivalry. This view, he suggests, buys uncritically into the narrative of the Cold War promoted by the Reagan administration (and John Lewis Gaddis), which argued that the Cold War followed logically and directly from the Second World War, as the U.S. manfully confronted a second aggressive totalitarian foe after the first. While partisans of this view concede that a feckless generation of US leaders lost sight of the essential implacability of Communism during the period of détente in the 1960s and 70s, once Reagan came into power with a determination to call a spade a spade, the rollback of the Soviet Union became the natural culmination of the decades-long heroic and triumphant ideological struggle between good and evil.
For Stephenson, virtually every aspect of this orthodox narrative—which one suspects closely approximates how the Cold War is commonly presented today by national politicians and the mainstream media—is fundamentally wrong. In the first place, Stephanson argues, the Cold War was not the result of Soviet aggression, but rather was an “American project” that began in 1947 when Walter Lippmann popularized the term in a review of George Kennan’s “X” article. To Stephanson, the cold war served as discursive weapon in a domestic American policy debate argument about the need to continue internationalist engagement, and which served the material interests of the emergent military-industrial complex as well as American corporations bent on ensuring their ability to penetrate foreign markets. Some of Stephanson’s sharpest writing comes in his unpacking of the discursive nuances and subtleties that the metaphor of a “cold” war offered to its proponents. “Domestically, the cold war as an always already assumed structure of aggression imposed by totalitarian Moscow worked magnificently to render virtually impossible any opposition to Washington’s desire to act everywhere.” (34)
Second, according to Stephenson, the Cold War was basically over by 1962 with the Cuban Missile crisis and the Sino-Soviet split, both of which undermined the aggressively ideological position of the US. Nuclear weapons turned out to be “an ideology killer” both because the physical stakes they produced seemed higher than their ideological ones, and also because the logic of nuclear deterrence theory plainly had absolutely nothing to do with the ideological nature of the adversary. Likewise, the Sino-Soviet split put paid to the notion of an undifferentiated totalitarian Communist adversary, and opened up opportunities for the diplomatic triangulation, multipolarity, and forging of complex interdependence which would mark the next period of international history. For Stephenson, Reagan’s revivification of Cold War rhetoric in the 1980s was merely the twitching of a phantom ideological limb from the earlier, and the collapse of Soviet Union was not so much a “victory” for the U.S. as it was the final closure of the revolutionary “short Twentieth century” which began in 1917.
This revisionist chronology, which Stephanson admits he has been arguing for without much success since the 1980s, is used to set up a rather scathing critique Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War (2007), probably the most widely read piece of Cold War historiography of the last decade. For Westad, the Cold War cannot be reduced to “an American project” for hegemony (though it certainly was that), but rather is best seen as an ideological struggle between competing visions of modernization, liberal-capitalist and communist. For Westad, these ideological stakes came into sharpest focus in the 1970s, which were neither simply an interregnum of détente (as the orthodox view has held) nor a “post-Cold War” world (as described in Stephanson’s revisionism) but rather the moment when the locus of the Cold War struggle shifted from the Global North to the Global South (above all Africa) which became the site of proxy wars and competing development projects meant to promote or showcase the virtues of various versions of modernization. For Stephanson, however, Westad’s narrative makes the mistake of taking what was an after-the-fact sideshow to the Cold War and treating it as revealing the ideological essence of the conflict. For Stephanson, Westad dislocation of the focus away from the West, and specifically from the postwar intentions of the United States, evacuates the Cold War of its essential political meaning, namely as a bipolar struggle for US to extend its postwar hegemony by containing the Soviet Union.
Westad’s much briefer riposte provides the basis for a debate that many of the subsequent chapters furtively engage. He finds Stephanson’s attempt to police the boundaries of what “counts” as the Cold War to be not just a reductionist manifestation of a reflexive leftism, but in fact at odds with the tradition of revisionist scholarship begun by William Appleman Williams and continued by scholars like Marilyn Young – much of which has taken a catholic view of the diverse ways and places that hegemonic power has attempted over the years to manifest itself, as well as the myriad forms of resistance that these efforts have encountered. Just because the US was the most consistently ideologically motivated actor of the Long Cold War is no reason to depict Stalin as playing “the straight man against the ideological hyperphobias of American leaders.” In the end, Westad argues that the purely American-centric view of the Cold War cannot be sustained, and more geographically, temporally, and topically pluralist understandings offer the best and perhaps only way to move past the ideological and political framings provided by the original Cold War actors themselves.
The first question, of periodization, is addressed directly in the pair of papers by Anders Stephanson and Odd Arne Westad that open the beautifully curated but poorly title Uncertain Empire. Building on his pathbreaking work in the 1990s on the genealogy of the idea of “cold war,” Stephanson engages in a broad interrogation and indictment of the slipperiness of the term and the comitant sloppiness with which it has been applied to refer to virtually all aspects of international relations between 1945 and 1989 that can plausibly be construed as having to do with Superpower rivalry. This view, he suggests, buys uncritically into the narrative of the Cold War promoted by the Reagan administration (and John Lewis Gaddis), which argued that the Cold War followed logically and directly from the Second World War, as the U.S. manfully confronted a second aggressive totalitarian foe after the first. While partisans of this view concede that a feckless generation of US leaders lost sight of the essential implacability of Communism during the period of détente in the 1960s and 70s, once Reagan came into power with a determination to call a spade a spade, the rollback of the Soviet Union became the natural culmination of the decades-long heroic and triumphant ideological struggle between good and evil.
For Stephenson, virtually every aspect of this orthodox narrative—which one suspects closely approximates how the Cold War is commonly presented today by national politicians and the mainstream media—is fundamentally wrong. In the first place, Stephanson argues, the Cold War was not the result of Soviet aggression, but rather was an “American project” that began in 1947 when Walter Lippmann popularized the term in a review of George Kennan’s “X” article. To Stephanson, the cold war served as discursive weapon in a domestic American policy debate argument about the need to continue internationalist engagement, and which served the material interests of the emergent military-industrial complex as well as American corporations bent on ensuring their ability to penetrate foreign markets. Some of Stephanson’s sharpest writing comes in his unpacking of the discursive nuances and subtleties that the metaphor of a “cold” war offered to its proponents. “Domestically, the cold war as an always already assumed structure of aggression imposed by totalitarian Moscow worked magnificently to render virtually impossible any opposition to Washington’s desire to act everywhere.” (34)
Second, according to Stephenson, the Cold War was basically over by 1962 with the Cuban Missile crisis and the Sino-Soviet split, both of which undermined the aggressively ideological position of the US. Nuclear weapons turned out to be “an ideology killer” both because the physical stakes they produced seemed higher than their ideological ones, and also because the logic of nuclear deterrence theory plainly had absolutely nothing to do with the ideological nature of the adversary. Likewise, the Sino-Soviet split put paid to the notion of an undifferentiated totalitarian Communist adversary, and opened up opportunities for the diplomatic triangulation, multipolarity, and forging of complex interdependence which would mark the next period of international history. For Stephenson, Reagan’s revivification of Cold War rhetoric in the 1980s was merely the twitching of a phantom ideological limb from the earlier, and the collapse of Soviet Union was not so much a “victory” for the U.S. as it was the final closure of the revolutionary “short Twentieth century” which began in 1917.
This revisionist chronology, which Stephanson admits he has been arguing for without much success since the 1980s, is used to set up a rather scathing critique Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War (2007), probably the most widely read piece of Cold War historiography of the last decade. For Westad, the Cold War cannot be reduced to “an American project” for hegemony (though it certainly was that), but rather is best seen as an ideological struggle between competing visions of modernization, liberal-capitalist and communist. For Westad, these ideological stakes came into sharpest focus in the 1970s, which were neither simply an interregnum of détente (as the orthodox view has held) nor a “post-Cold War” world (as described in Stephanson’s revisionism) but rather the moment when the locus of the Cold War struggle shifted from the Global North to the Global South (above all Africa) which became the site of proxy wars and competing development projects meant to promote or showcase the virtues of various versions of modernization. For Stephanson, however, Westad’s narrative makes the mistake of taking what was an after-the-fact sideshow to the Cold War and treating it as revealing the ideological essence of the conflict. For Stephanson, Westad dislocation of the focus away from the West, and specifically from the postwar intentions of the United States, evacuates the Cold War of its essential political meaning, namely as a bipolar struggle for US to extend its postwar hegemony by containing the Soviet Union.
Westad’s much briefer riposte provides the basis for a debate that many of the subsequent chapters furtively engage. He finds Stephanson’s attempt to police the boundaries of what “counts” as the Cold War to be not just a reductionist manifestation of a reflexive leftism, but in fact at odds with the tradition of revisionist scholarship begun by William Appleman Williams and continued by scholars like Marilyn Young – much of which has taken a catholic view of the diverse ways and places that hegemonic power has attempted over the years to manifest itself, as well as the myriad forms of resistance that these efforts have encountered. Just because the US was the most consistently ideologically motivated actor of the Long Cold War is no reason to depict Stalin as playing “the straight man against the ideological hyperphobias of American leaders.” In the end, Westad argues that the purely American-centric view of the Cold War cannot be sustained, and more geographically, temporally, and topically pluralist understandings offer the best and perhaps only way to move past the ideological and political framings provided by the original Cold War actors themselves.
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September 13, 2015An astounding collection of essays meant to fundamentally recast how we interpret the Cold War. Begins with a great essay by Anders Stephenson, who argues (in a purposefully provocative manner) that the Cold War actually ended with the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other great essays by Odd Arne Westad, Andrew Preston, Philip Mirowski, and many more. Absolutely essential.
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