La guerra fredda. Cinquant'anni di paura e speranza

by John Lewis Gaddis

It began during the Second World War, when American and Soviet troops converged from east and west. Their meeting point—a small German city—became part of a front line that solidified shortly thereafter into an Iron Curtain. It ended in a climactic square-off between Ronald Reagan’s America and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. In between were decades of global confrontation, uncertainty, and fear.

Drawing on new and often startling information from newly opened Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives, this thrilling account explores the strategic dynamics that drove the Cold War, provides illuminating portraits of its major personalities, and offers much fresh insight into its most crucial events. Riveting, revelatory, and wise, it tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand as America once more faces an implacable ideological enemy.
--highbridgeaudio.com

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, War, World History, American History, Russia

326 pages, Paperback

First published December 29, 2005

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“[T]he war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war – ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily – with one another. Whatever the Grand Alliance’s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting, to attain…”
- John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

Despite having an admitted big-book bias, when I went looking for a general history of the fraught, potentially-world-destroying period from 1945 to 1991, John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War proved an easy choice.

For one, it comes with an impeccable pedigree, having been produced by a renowned historian of this particular era. Gaddis has written extensively on the Cold War, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Kennan. His work has been credited – for better and for worse – with shaping the way that many view the so-called “long peace.”

More importantly, as becomes clear early on, The Cold War is the product of a great deal of thought. Even though it’s not much longer than a typical cell phone contract, Gaddis makes his words count. Instead of a sweeping, all-encompassing account of every political decision, uprising, revolution, coup, crisis, and limited war, Gaddis breaks things down into what he considers the decisive moments, and uses them as a springboard for illuminating discussions of how it went down, and what it all meant.

***

Employing a word count only slightly higher than one of my wife’s Instagram posts, Gaddis cannot simply start his narrative at the Potsdam Conference and end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has to be creative.

To that end, The Cold War is broken into seven chapters that somewhat resemble essays. Though taken as a whole they follow an overarching chronology – the opening chapter begins as the Second World War ends, while the last chapter gives us the Soviet Union’s collapse – within each chapter there is a great deal of temporal overlap. Instead of marching along the timeline, Gaddis explores different themes, such as the differences between the communist and capitalist systems, the way that post-colonialism intertwined with the larger Cold War, and the change in thinking among world leaders that helped lead to its finale.

***

In my own nod to briefness, I’ll give just one example about how this is executed.

The second chapter of The Cold War is focused on the threat of nuclear war. Gaddis begins in Korea, with Truman – who claimed to have lost no sleep ordering the first atomic bombings in history – refusing to allow A-bombs to be deployed against the Chinese troops pouring over the Yalu. This non-use of a potentially war-deciding weapon was critical. Eventually, it turned into a taboo, a bright moral line that – hopefully – would not be easily crossed.

From there, the discussion flows into the disturbing logic created by rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals: That it was only the overwhelming presence of globe-killing weapons that kept said weapons from being used. The reasoning behind mutually assured destruction led to test ban treaties, limits on certain types of missiles, and a joint agreement not to create anti-ballistic missile systems. It took the Cuban Missile Crisis – with the United States on the verge of plunging into a tactical nuke ambush – for both sides to take a much-needed moment to reevaluate.

Instead of spreading the above throughout the book, as would happen in a straightforward, sequential telling, Gaddis puts it into a single section.

***

Even as the Cold War unfolded, with the issues all in doubt, people were busy trying to diagnose its causes, and already criticizing the manner in which it was waged. Over time, historians generally separated themselves into three different “schools.”

The “orthodox” interpretation saw the genesis of the Cold War in Joseph Stalin’s expansionary policies before, during, and after World War II. Following America’s disastrous tour in Vietnam, the “revisionist” school emerged, shifting blame onto the United States for containment policies allegedly meant to establish American hegemony. The “post-revisionist” school, of which Gaddis was once a founding member, tried to blend the two positions.

The Cold War espouses a view that hews closer to orthodox than anything else. This is a function of Gaddis’s change in thinking following the opening of the Soviet archives. Whether or not you agree with him, the position itself is a legitimate one, and eminently supportable. Indeed, as the name itself implies, this is a pretty standard take.

***

Gaddis has a pretty good reputation. Nevertheless, The Cold War received sharply mixed reviews when it was released back in 2005. Several different critiques have been leveled, but I’ll briefly recap just two.

First, Gaddis has been accused of narrowing his scope too much, so that it only really contains the United States and the Soviet Union, with the U.S. perspective given prominence.

To me, this falls into the well, duh category. The Cold War is roughly the length of the instruction manual for an IKEA end-table. With circumspection the name of the game, it makes total sense – at least to me – that Gaddis placed all his emphasis on the dual superpowers competing for the prize. If you want to see the Cold War through the eyes of Guatemala – for instance – you’ll need to look beyond a brief general survey such as this.

Second, Gaddis has been critiqued for his Reagan-like simplification of the Cold War into a contest of good versus evil.

This is a more interesting critique, because Gaddis is definitely not shy about sharing his belief that America’s triumph in the Cold War amounted to a net positive. Bearing in mind the sharp decline in the reputation of the United States following the invasion of Iraq – which Gaddis supported – this disapproval is not unexpected, and has some merit.

Still, the utter subjectivity of this discussion makes it impossible to say whether Gaddis is right or wrong. This won’t stop people from saying it, but simply having a strongly held belief is not the same as having an incontrovertible argument.

Importantly, Gaddis does not pretend the United States was a blameless innocent. To the contrary, he presents an entire chapter about the morality of American actions. Certainly, he often defends those actions, but at no point does he pretend that extremely questionable – and illegal, and immoral – deeds were not done.

At one point, Gaddis presents a running tally, showing that for every Soviet outrage, America had a corresponding one of her own. The Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising; the United States supported a coup in Iran; the Soviets snuffed out the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia; the United States worked overtime to undermine Salvador Allende in Chile. Stalin rubber-stamped North Korea’s failed invasion of the South; Kennedy did the same thing at the Bay of Pigs.

Gaddis also reminds us, repeatedly, that the Cold War got plenty hot, and plenty bloody. Just because it could have been worse, doesn’t mean it wasn’t pretty bad.

***

If I wanted to have my own opinions repeated back to me, I’d just read my diary or talk to myself in the mirror. What I ask is that judgments are obtained through the use of logic supported by facts, and that when evidence is contradictory, it’s weighted with at least an attempt at impartiality.

In the end, I think that The Cold War came to its verdicts honestly, even if I didn’t agree with them all. Gaddis uses his brevity quite effectively, and this succeeds quite well as an introductory volume, even as it eschews a methodical, blow-by-blow structure. Elegantly written and cleanly argued, it does not represent the last word or the final say. Instead, it provides a perfect jumping-off point for further study.

[Jan-Maat]

To say this book is bad would be a little unfair, though it does seem to rely on the reader being ignorant and gullible, however I did find it surprisingly ungood particularly considering his earlier book We now know which I assume was written by the same person it was.

His basic message is that it was the free market what won it, and that it could have been far worse - meaning that more Americans might have died, even all of them perhaps though that seems to me to be far too optimistic about the capabilities of Soviet missiles, that the lives of people in the countries where the Cold War was fought, even those who died in order that a red flag would never flutter above Nebraska or New Mexico, don't really count is a feature of this book. On the other hand, fans of Reagan and Thatcher and J-P II might be disappointed that, despite the page space they get, they aren't explicitly credited with winning the Cold War and creating the universal happiness and boundless wealth that everybody alive currently enjoys.

This is an account from a US perspective written by an American with I assume a US audience in mind, well fair enough, you get what you pay for with books, or in this case what you can find on other people's shelves, however delightfully bemused though I am at how important Gaddis finds the watergate crisis to the Cold War but not the Kennedy assassination, though the failed attempts on the lives of Reagan and J-P. II are so important to the course of the Cold War that they have to be mentioned, but not the failed attempt on the life of Thatcher even though the terrorist Freedom Fighters involved in that were getting weapons, indirectly no doubt, from Warsaw Pact countries, I find his complete lack of analysis of US strategic thinking historically negligent, we get no insight in to why or how Domino theory seized the US strategic imagination, or indeed why despite some US successes in shifting alliances, they felt that dominoes would only fall one way, I had the feeling that Gaddis avoided asking where the US was in 1968 or 1956 by chopping up the timeline of his narrative, here Nixon meets Mao (1972) before the Prague Spring (1968) and he deals with 1956 in three different well separated segments. Here Gaddis speaks the same language, has access to archives, could interview participants but has nothing of note to say about US thinking or strategy which is what I naively might hope from a US book.

Although I did learn that the it was the Cold War that learnt the US government to be duplicitous and use secret agents, this, Gaddis thinks, never happened before. Also according to him all national liberation movement leaders were Wilsonian Democrats doubtless all enjoying watching 'Birth of a Nation' and fantasising about the knights of the South in their free time too , and if they didn't realise that and thought they were Marxists instead - well they just brought trouble on their own heads apparently but as above if they died as a result they were non-Americans and so don't count. Also in like fashion he is breezy and dismissive of popular Communist movements, being on the verge of electoral victory in post war Italy - all due to money from the Soviet Union apparently, the role of communist partisans and resistance movements during World War Two too unimportant to mention, and therefore justifying massive inflows of US cash to the Christian Democrats even more or less depending on your point of view dubious recipients are not mentioned, but since they were anti-communist that would have been fine.

One gets the sense that other countries may go Communist or Islamic fundamentalist, but otherwise have no right to deviate from US Strategic objectives (even though these aren't explained) therefore de Gaulle is 'the ultimate free rider'(oh the ingratitude!), little countries abusing their geopolitical position to wag the dog is like judo, just plain unAmerican.

I was slightly disappointed as I recalled Gaddis' earlier book We now know as being mildly interesting on the role of unpatriotic US bears in almost triggering nuclear war due to over enthusiastic rattling of security fencing at American airbases the extent to which American Brown bears had been infiltrated by Marxist-Leninist thinking remains sadly under explored despite the evidence of Yogi Bear and his televised efforts to appropriate the picnic baskets of the bourgeoisie and of the banks of the Capitalist / Western world keeping Eastern European Communist countries afloat through loans creating the prospect of an Autumn of the Patriarch style alternative ending to the Cold War when the bailiffs are sent in to take the whole country way .

A book is a finite thing, so sometimes what you notice most is what the author chooses not to discuss. Here the interesting absence is espionage, for older readers I imagine the spy story is the archetypal cold war narrative, but here there are no bugs in hotel rooms, honey-traps, microfilms, exchanges of compromised agents before dawn on foggy bridges, instead Gaddis' story is largely of technology, and waiting for decades for Reagan to come along and disarm Gorbachev with his Hollywood smile, maybe he's right...maybe this is so high level an account that it is impossible to imagine any connection between the tree and the forest.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you asked the 10 best historians in the world to write a history of the Cold War in under 250 pages, you would get back 10 works that were overly broad, sweeping, slanted, and/or missing key facts. Gaddis hasn't avoided all these pitfalls, but it's an excellent effort, and most important for his target audience, the book is eminently readable. He creates a sense of urgency and page-turning suspense in a book that describes the history of a war that never actually got "hot." His political leanings and his triumphalism aside, he does a fantastic job of capturing the key players, motives, and events of the Cold War for a generation that has been raised after the falling of the Berlin Wall-- scary, huh?

[Micah Cummins · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Cold War: A New History" by John Lewis Gaddis is a wonderful introduction to the incredibly complex narrative of the Cold War years. Although not an exhaustively detailed account of the Cold War and the surrounding conflicts, it gives wonderful snapshots of key events surrounding the conflict, and lays a very helpful springboard to go off of into more detailed readings. I highly enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to broaden their knowledge of the Cold War, as well as the political and social conflicts that followed in its wake. Five Stars.

[Saadia B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both US and Soviet Union had been born in revolution and embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed would also do so for the rest of the world. Entered the war as a result of the suprise attack: the German invasion of the Soviet Union which begun on June 22, 1941 and the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 which Hitler used as an excuse to declare war on US four days later.

America thanks to an ingenious constitution, geographical isolation from potential rivals and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful state. The US was able to choose where, when and in what circumstances it would fight, a fact that greatly minimized the costs and risks of fighting. Americans emerged from the war with their economy thriving: wartime spending caused the GDP almost to double in less than 4 years. The Soviet Union enjoyed no such advantages, the only option apart from surrender was desperate resistance on terrian and in circumstances chosen by its enemy.

The stark fact that the Americans and the British could not have defeated Hitler without Stalin's help meant that World War II was a victory over fascism only, not over authoritarianism and its prospects for the future. The Soviet Union had Stalin as its unchallenged ruler since 1929, the man who remade his country and then led it to victory in World War II. Stalin's goal was not to restore a balance of power in Europe but rather to dominate that continent as thoroughly as Hitler had sought to do. The US could not continue to serve as a model for the rest of the world while remaining apart from the rest of the world.

Stalin wanted to control the Eastern Europe and Germany as part of the cooperation between British, America and Soviet Union. What happened in Germany and Eastern Europe left the US with little incentive to include Soviet Union in the occupation of Japan. Stalin had promised to enter the Pacific war three months after Germany's surrender in return for which Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to transfer the owned Kurile Islands to Soviet control as well as to restore the Southern half of Sakhalin Islands along with territorial rights and naval bases in Manchuria. But that was before the US successfully tested its first atomic bomb in July, 1945.

Roosevelt and Churchill envisaged a postwar settlement which would balance power while embracing principles. Stalin visioned a settlement that could secure his country's security while simultaneously encouraging the rivalries among capitalists that he believed would bring about a new war. Stalin fell into the trap of Marshall plan laid for him which was used to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe. The events in Prague together with the Berlin blockade convinced the European recipients of American economic assitance that they needed military protection as well, that led to the creation of NATO. The fundamental premise of the Marshall plan had been that the US could safely concerntrate on European economic reconstruction while deferring any significant military backup that could match Soviet capabilites.

Favorable prospects for Soviet Union were that on August 1949, the Soviet Union got its own bomb. Mao proclaimed the formation of the People's Republic of China on 1st October, 1949. Mao in June 1949 announced that he would ally with the Soviet Union. Mao and Stalin signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty in which the two communist states pledged to come to the assistance of the other in case of an attack. Korea like Germany had been jointly occupied by Soviet and American forces at the end of the World War II. North Korea decided to invade South Korea, US came for its defense by its own authority and under the United Nations as well. The members of the Grand Alliance were now Cold War adversaries.

On December 2nd, Mac Arthur ordered the US Air Force to drop 5 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs on Chinese columns advancing down the Korean peninsula. Soviet Union under immense pressure from its Chinese allies gave the US a 48 hours ultimatum to halt all military operations on the Korean peninsula or face the most severe consequences. The fighting in Korea dragged for another 2 years. The Cuban Missile crisis proved that the weapons each side possessed were a greater threat to the entire world than the US and the Soviet Union did to one another.

A series of Soviet American agreements began to emerge acknowledging the danger nuclear weapons posed to the capitalist and communist worlds alike. These included an unwritten understanding that both sides would tolerate satellite reconnaisssance. The Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1963 abolished nuclear tests in the atmosphere. In 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requiring nations posessing nuclear weapons not to help other states acquire them. The Strategic Arms Limitation Interim Agreement, 1972 restricted the number of land and sea based ballistic missiles to be allowed to each side.

Despite many setbacks the SALT II negotiators produced a complex treaty signed at Vienna in June 1979. In December, 1979 NATO agreed to the Peshing II and curise missile deployments only to have the Soviet Union respond by invading Afghanistan. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion changed Soviet Union's perception about nuclear weapons and their usage. In December 1987, US and Soviet Union signed a treaty for the dismantling of all intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe. Soon Soviet Union and American obversers were witnessing the actual destruction of missiles that had revived Cold War tensions only a few years back. The US provided covert and sometimes overt support to forces resisting Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Central America and elsewhere.

In 1987, decisions followed to begin the withdrawing of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and to reduce support for Marxist regimes elsewhere in the third world. Changes started to take place in the Eastern Europe and Soviet Union did not do anything to curb them as they realized that force could only work for sometime only hence they let people decide the fate of their countries. Germany reunified and remained with NATO, while the Soviet forces stationed on German territory withdrew, American forces remained. Finally on 25th December, 1991 Soviet Union was dissolved.

The most important departure from determinism during the Cold War had to do with hot wars. Prior to 1945 great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape. After 1945 however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan or to wars among smaller powers like the four wars Israel and its Arab neighbours fought between 1948 to 1973 or the three wars between India and Pakistan or the long, bloody and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s. In the Cold war because nuclear weapons could be used hence no war took place.

By the mid 1950s these lethal devices together with the means of delivering them almost instantly anywhere had placed all states at risk. As a consequence, one of the principal reasons for engaging in war in the past, the protection of one's own territory no longer made sense. At the same time competition for territory another traditional cause of war was becoming less profitable than it once had been. Satellite reconnaissance and the other intelligence breakthoughs also contributed to the obsolescence of major wars by dimishing the possibility of surprise in starting them and by eliminating opportunities for concealment in waging them.

A second escape from determinism involved the discrediting of dictatorships. Communism had promised to deliver a better life but failed to provide it. Third evolution came from the globalization of democratization. The number of democracies quintupled during the last half of the 20th century. The information revolution reinforced the speed of democracy because it permitted people to inform themselves and react to what they learned more quickly than in the past.

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[Dеnnis]

History is written by the winners. This book is no way an exception to this adage. True, I was born in the vanquished state, yet I was in a tender age, when the collapse occurred hence unlike adults I lost little in the process. Or I was lucky enough to have parents and family to shield me from the embittering and devastating effects of the chaos that ensued. Anyway I approached the book with as open mind as possible, given the situation.

Previously I was smitten with revelations of how the Cold War unfolded in Europe, following my reading of the wonderful Tony Judt’s “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945”. There the whole misery of European countries beyond the Iron Curtain dawned on me (not that it was only hopeless drudgery instead of life over there. There were bright spots for sure). We are not that much educated upon what was happening in USSR-influenced territories. Prevailing opinion here is that they just sucked of vital resources, which were more than necessary home, since people in USSR we constantly confronted with shortages of this and that. And when those countries eagerly rushed into embraces of the archenemy – well, they were branded ungrateful renegades, who defected even when we afforded them better living conditions than we had ourselves.

Now the book. I did count on objective narrative of this most cynical standoff that dominated world politics for nearly 50 years. And it appears that the author did try to make a book precisely like that. But to me it appears that it just proved the rule, quoted in the beginning. Time and again I tried to check my frustrations saying “it’s just because you’re from the USSR and it’s your natural defensiveness”. Thus maybe you should also doubt my impressions, but I tried to be unbiased.

First of all I believe such histories should be written by the least biased nationals as possible, either by neutrals or…Swedes :) Because time and again I felt that Communist block’s actions were thoroughly thrashed and vilified while similar misgivings and CRIMES by the US were giving a superficial disapproval, without exposing their full horrible consequences.

True, the author perfunctory coverage of the Vietnam War is compensated with equally tangential description of Afghan War (where no US participation is acknowledged, no matter how direct). Yet while the USSR is being lambasted for its role in suppression of Hungarian and Czech uprisings, American actions in other countries are presented in far less dramatic cadences.

What actually pricked my ears first early in the book was author’s statement that since the Americans preferred a state of aloofness they didn’t pestered foreign nations. He does acknowledge that the US had procured a colony for itself in Philippines. Not so fast, I read S. Kinzer’s wonderful book “Overthrow: America’s century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq”. You don’t fool me. USA finished independent kingdom of Hawaii on a whim, USA invaded Cuba on a trumped up pretext, and there were several other blatant cases beyond the acknowledged interventions in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam and Chile. Should I be surprised that the US invaded Grenada as late as mid 80-es to forestall recently elected leftist government there (just in case – it’s our underbelly after all) and the author prefers not to mention it, overawed by the unfolding disintegration of corrupted Eastern Bloc in Europe?

Yet by and large all these my pickings are just historical footnotes and may as well be subjective. What counts is now. And looking at the winner and the world it created I cannot say that the best scenario had won the global dominance. US (with defeated Russia not far away) is world’s leader for prison inmates. Itself and its citizens are carrying the largest debt, and has the military strength mightier than several followers combined with bases and secret prisons everywhere. It has a huge number of homeless people and there’s no safety net, enjoyed by the oppressed citizens of the Eastern block. If now all those unlucky millions who eat dust in the wake of the rat race towards the American dream are asked “How would you look at guaranteed lifetime employment with salary and generous paid vacations, decent free medicine and free college education (and higher) and a pension enough not only to survive, but to still have a human dignity (things all people in Soviet block had), but have little say in matters of politics, don’t have a tremendous choice of goods, and opportunities to travel beyond a dozen of states, but where country leaders are not fat cats, and where you can let your 7-year old child travel the public transport to go to the free Olympic swimming pool for practice half a city size of Moscow away (myself) without any threat of him being molested, kidnapped or shot”? I am not sure everyone would have chosen an abstract ‘freedom’, being sold now.

Be sure I’m not an apologist of the USSR, but as I said above, if it was Sweden or any other Nordic European country that had won the Cold War and established its system’s supremacy and model all over the world, I would have had no qualms. But here in this book I encounter a narrative that offers no explanation for the imploration of the Eastern block beyond the statement that ‘times they a’ changing’ and new leaders of the West had hugely benefited from their stints as actors to cut new figures on the political scene (Reagan and John Paul II). Yet all the way being very pleased that the ‘bad guys’ lost.

My Goodreads friend Caroline has recently reviewed a book on the apparent shortcomings of ‘free capitalism’ - "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism". It appears that taken at face value and with blind faith the ‘free market’ system as viable and human being friendly as theoretical communism. Quite the opposite that is.

This is the only reason I didn’t like the book, which instills a thought that the best ever option won, and currently as it controls the world, we are living in the best reality possible. When in fact it’s not. It does sound self-congratulatory indeed.

P.S.
For a great objective review of a conflict, we all think we know everything about, try “Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization “. Here the author tries to see real Carthage under the layers of interpretations and clichés heaped upon it by centuries of Roman commentators and the later admirers. The picture appearing does not flatter the Romans…

[Brian Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well-condensed summary, which is primarily focused on U.S.–U.S.S.R. relations. I like how Gaddis takes a long view, and points out the signs of hope in how things developed. For example, he notes how in WWII, all warring states restrained themselves from using their stockpiles of poison gas. Then in the Cold War, all enemy nations refrained from using their new atomic weapons. A consensus seemed to be forming that victory in war is not worth it if it destroys the things fought for, be those things actual societies, or their basic standards of human decency.

However, I feel the book is outdated in its promotion of American exceptionalism and triumphalism. Gaddis portrays the USA as emerging onto the world stage after the world wars, innocent of the Old World’s battles for world domination: “The United States, … was not about to defend European colonialism …. Its own history had begun in rebellion against and empire.” As if it had not fully engaged in the race for domination across North America, Latin America, and the Pacific.

Then, in comparing the USA and the Soviet Union, Gaddis almost always paints the Americans as offering positive inducements for justice, while the Soviets rely on threats and fear:

“Both of the ideologies that defined these worlds were meant to offer hope: that is why one has a ideology in the first place. One of them, however, had come to depend … upon the creation of fear. The other had no need to do so. Therein lay the basic ideological asymmetry of the Cold War.”

As if the USA never helped European colonial powers to retain their colonies after WWII. As if it never helped overthrow governments in Guatemala, Iran, Haiti, Brazil, Argentina, or Chile. As if it never armed anti-socialist death squads across Central America, or gave military support to capitalistic dictators across Africa and Asia. As if it never invaded Panama or Grenada, or bombed Indochina for decades.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Cold War: A New History provides an excellent example of the ideological biases of a historian creating a skewed misrepresentation of the facts about an era in order to conform with biased perceptions. This so-called “new history” is full of sweeping generalizations, unwarranted conclusions, and dubious assertions that scream out bias at every turn. In conclusion, beware of books claiming to be history books! This one doesn’t meet the most basic criteria of objective reporting of the facts.

[Ola G · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10 stars

A difficult book to rate. The early chapters were very good indeed, highly informative, incredibly succint, and showcasing an enviable amount of knowledge and mastery of the wide field of information. But the closer we get to our times, and incidentally to the times I can actually remember or was told about/know source materials, the more wishy-washy the book becomes. Gaddis's personal preferences and bias were much more noticeable in the later parts of the book - and it's probably inevitable, because instead of history we're talking about events that happened within our - or our parents' - lifetimes. These are always much harder to describe and analyse, to synthesise to meaningful nuggets of information without losing important bits along the way. And let's not forget it's much more difficult to agree which bits are important, or how to judge them ;)

That said, I think Gaddis's choice to depict the last years of the Cold War through the lens of actors, instead of events, is the book's biggest weakness. Possibly, it was also inevitable because of the chaotic and unpredictable nature of these events, but nevertheless because of this choice his book turns from an engaging analysis of history to a somewhat gossipy and biased description of people in power. For example, Gaddis's love for right-wing personalities, such as Reagan or John Paul II, seems to overcome his good senses of a historian, and he depicts these two only in superlatives. The reality was a bit more complex, I'd argue.

Also, there is a bitter irony in the fact that less than two decades after Gaddis pronounced obsolescence of traditional wars we have one just like that in the middle of Europe.

Criticism aside, though, it is very illuminating to read how the Cold War order still seems to influence the thinking and decision-making processes, as well as assumptions about the global geo-political situation, of the main actors.

Worth a read.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cold War: A New History is among the latest entries by John Lewis Gaddis on the history and politics of the Cold War. Though it reviews a time still within the living memory of many, Gaddis frets that younger generations have grown up without an understanding or an appreciation for the important lessons of the Cold War. This he thinks a shame, perhaps even a danger. So to provide a remedy and cure the ailment of historical ignorance, Gaddis proposes to write a history—a new history—that will supply his readers an account in short form of the essentials of the Cold War.

This anyway is the original intent of the book. But Gaddis does not develop his history in the way the typical history might. Gaddis does not retell the course of the Cold War year by year. He does not explain why this thing or why that. Gaddis engages the matter differently. He recounts the Cold War by its themes, rather than by its chronology. His chapters do not proceed in a linear course from the beginning of the Cold War to the end. Rather each chapter fixates on a particular theme that figures large in the Cold War, and then elaborates on the most signal events. One theme for each chapter: the first on the origins of the Cold War; the second on the perils of nuclear confrontation; the third on the failure of Soviet ideology and economy; the fourth on the burdens of superpower status; the fifth on the backlash to immoral foreign policies; the sixth on rise of Cold War iconoclasts; and the seventh on the marvel of bloodless revolution that ended the Cold War.

These themes form the very essence of Gaddis's book. Although it may be history, it is history in the thematic sense. Therefore what Gaddis's book ultimately supplies is not a description of the Cold War. It could not even be generously characterized as an explanation. Rather what Gaddis gives is an interpretation—and a moral one at that. The whole of the book abounds with moral overtones. The sense of right and wrong is everywhere. Historical figures are drawn as either black or white. Ideologies are contrasted as moral opposites. Outcomes in the Cold War are delivered with the authority of a judge’s verdict. The whole of the history is perceived as the completion of an inevitable, inescapable arch. The book therefore oozes with moral sentiments.

If this understanding of Gaddis's New History is right, what then are the larger morals and lessons that he intends to impress on his readers? Though Gaddis offers half-dozen smaller morals, surprisingly there is no single overarching takeaway. Gaddis tries to repair this omission in the epilogue of his book. There he tries to elaborate what are the implications of the period for post Cold War. But this efforts comes up far short; his improvised conclusions have all the texture and flavor of stale bread. He refers to the obsolescence of war, the discrediting of dictatorship, and the rise of democracy and globalization. But these sound more like the ejections of scholarly reflex rather than well-considered, deliberate conclusions. And the disjunct between it and the chapters that precede it are so great, the epilogue might as well be discarded.

Gaddis's real lessons of the Cold War are found instead in the seven main chapters themselves. Each serves as a little historical allegory onto itself. There is a unity in that they all are associated with the Cold War. But as explained above, they do not combine to form one single overarching moral. It is fitting then to gives brief mention of the chapter lessons each.

The book begins with consideration of the origins of the Cold War. For Gaddis, the critical point is that the mistrust that nurtured the Cold War’s origins had taken root before the defeat of Nazi Germany. These suspicions were deep-set and mutually shared. They beget intrigue and recrimination. The peace settlements at the end of the Second World War served to exacerbate the mistrust, rather than alleviate it. So for Gaddis the emergence of Cold War politics was more fact than failure. The rise of Cold War politics was not a blunder of statesmanship, but a necessary and unavoidable evil.

The second chapter considers the influence of nuclear weapons on Cold War politics. Gaddis lauds President Truman's decision to resist using atomic weapons in Korea. It was, he says, one of the most important decisions of inaction of all the 20th century. But it was not at first appreciated. Like in the game of Poker, enthusiasts usually celebrate great bates or great bluffs. But who boasts about a really great fold? For this reason Truman’s insight had to be relearned. It required the perilous experience of the Eisenhower and Khrushchev years to appreciate the wisdom of Truman’s nuclear moratorium.

The third chapter draws out the ideological dimension of the Cold War. Under Gaddis’s understanding, the Cold War was less a time of tense, distrustful relations—it was less about relaxing the enmity of the early Cold War years—and more a contest between two revolutionary regimes, idealized by Lenin on the side and Wilson on the other. So by this theory, the failing economy and bankruptcy of the Soviet economy was not so much about the vicissitudes of international economics, but much more a confirmation of the triumph of American ideology.

The fourth chapter portrays the Soviets and the Americans as prisoner to their own superpower status. For all their power and influence, the superpowers were hostage to the failures and shortfalls of their allies and protectorates. The leaders of client states like Taiwan, the Koreas, the Germanys, the Vietnams, and Afghanistan, were able to frighten their superpower patrons into commitments out of proportion with their interests. Rather than the US and the Soviets uniting over their strength, they divided because of the weakness of their allies. Perhaps most embarrassing, allies like France and China learned to manipulate Cold War politics so to seize all the benefits of alliance while resisting the costs. Woe onto the superpowers.

The fifth chapter discusses the backlash in America to the experience of Cold War politics. Allegations of foreign intrigues, coups, assassinations, secret bombings, and war levied on false pretenses—these all had generated a deep well of resentment in the American public. By the height of the Vietnam War, the American public was bristling with anger. Revelation of Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate scandal brought this anger to a head. Dramatic political action followed. Congress terminated funds for Vietnam and Angola; it sabotaged Kissinger’s trade treaty with the Soviets; it set new limits on President’s powers of war and surveillance; the CIA was forced to disclose its notorious episodes of its clandestine activities. A new zeitgeist was had taken hold in US foreign policy. Leaders who adopted principled foreign policies were encouraged. Immoral, and amoral, foreign policies had fallen into disrepute.

The sixth chapter was example that even the powerful inertia of Cold War politics can be reversed. Though the Cold War world had become established as the political status quo, the emergence of new leaders like John Paul II, Thatcher, Walesa, Xiaoping, Reagan, and especially Gorbachev, combined to create a new political atmosphere. These leaders were not prisoner to the old politics and the legacies of their predecessors. They intended to be agents for change – and they succeeded. In spite of powerful countervailing forces, by 1989 enough incremental steps had been taken the politics of the Cold War was ripe for dramatic change.

The seventh chapter is a panegyric to what Gaddis calls the first bloodless revolution in history. It was he says what the Bolshevik revolution had wanted to be: spontaneous and truly popular. With the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union, an enormous political change was brought about. But it was achieved without war, and with a surprisingly little bloodshed. The ending of the Cold War exploded the myth that great revolutions are inevitably attended by great suffering. The peaceful retirement of the Soviet empire was proof of the possibility.

These anyway are the larger lessons that Gaddis is really intent upon. Much of his book is history. But both above and beneath that history are these larger morals that he perceives. Of course these different points can be debated; one could accuse Gaddis of partiality, of oversimplification, of exaggeration, of presumption, and similar criticisms. But these are weaknesses inherent to any book that gives a moral history. It is not surprising that a distinguished historian, on a subject of his expertise, and in the twilight of his career, might descant on the greater moral lessons of the Cold War. This is well within the traditions of historical writing. And so far as these criticisms would try and quibble with his history or unmake his morals conclusions, they would miss the mark.

That said, the book does suffer from serious deficiencies. Gaddis claims to be writing history. But his book is more a compilation of historical essays than history itself. Nevertheless Gaddis insists on having it both ways; he wants both the history and the space to expound upon it. Although this may not be a flawed strategy in principle, in practice Gaddis has failed to achieve this balance in his book. This divided purpose, between explanation and interpretation, tends to create confusion within his chapters. His main point is often lost in a blizzard of anecdotes and historical citations. The books moral arguments often do not persuade, and perhaps worse, they rarely inspire. Some of his arguments suffer because he takes his moralizing too far, such as his comparison of Lenin and Wilson, with a severe condemnation of the former and a drooling endorsement of the latter. But more often his arguments do not impress since Gaddis prefers to assert rather than consider. Unlike other famous writers on history, Gaddis does not spare much space for deliberation. He resembles more a sea bird that is only willing to skim the surface and then quickly return to flight, rather than show a willingness to dive in and delve deep. This gives his whole history a light, glancing, insubstantial feeling. Although this may suffice if Gaddis was writing history in the conventional manner, it will not do for his moral history. The book then is somewhat of a disappointment. But the disappointment must be double for Gaddis himself. After much study and labor on a subject for so many years, one would think Gaddis would meditate more seriously on the lessons of the Cold War and its meaning for history; the kind of serious reflections that often form the crown of an illustrious academic career. A New History does not rise to the challenge. For Gaddis, it is an opportunity missed.

[Costantino Andrea De Luca · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'autore è uno storico statunitense dichiaratamente filoamericano. Tale bias emerge in tutti i capitoli, forse in maniera troppo evidente. Tanto per fare un esempio, il leader sovietico Krusciov viene rappresentato come una testa calda abituata ad agire senza un piano preciso: "Cosa esattamente Krusciov intendesse fare con i suoi missili a Cuba non è, ancora oggi, chiaro: era tipico del personaggio non riflettere a lungo. [...] Era come un bambino petulante che gioca con un fucile carico" (pp. 105-106).

I presidenti statunitensi, al contrario, ricevono spesso elogi (quantomeno quelli repubblicani). Reagan viene descritto come un uomo brillante, mentre Gorbacëv appare meno competente e più succube degli eventi.

Nonostante ciò, il libro risulta scorrevole, chiaro e interessante. Riassume tutte le fasi della Guerra fredda, dalla fine della Seconda guerra mondiale fino al crollo dell'URSS, rivolgendosi principalmente a chi conosce poco gli argomenti o necessita di un ripasso. Contiene anche diverse citazioni e curiosità gradevoli, tutte supportate da precise note bibliografiche. Nel complesso, la lettura è risultata utile e piacevole.

[Greg Brown · Rating 1 out of 5]

About as enlightening as a head injury. Gaddis is purportedly the "dean of Cold War history" but poorly makes that case in this short and deliberately-confusing history of the Cold War.

For one, there's the strange way he structures the narrative for most of the book: in four odd thematic chapters that overlap in time and often elide any inconvenient fact or consideration that would get in the way of Gaddis' thesis. So we get weird stuff like insisting until LBJ/Nixon, presidents couldn't see their presidencies hampered by foreign wars—wholly ignoring the whopping case of Truman not running for re-election in 1952 due to the Korean War! Most of the time he'll ignore domestic political constraints and pressures, just treating political decisions as sui generis.

Worse yet is his hagiography of Reagan, treating the man's delusions around the SDI as heartfelt and respectable, and totally whitewashing blunders like Iran-Contra or his failure at Reykjavik. Wasn't until later that I looked up Gaddis' bio and found out he advised GWB during his administration, which makes sense: the dude loves the tough man vibes. Too bad it drags down the book into the ravings of a dolt.

Read America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (2nd edition) instead. So much better.

[D'Ailleurs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ομολογώ ότι δεν διαβάζω πολλά μη λογοτεχνικά βιβλία (για την ακρίβεια σχεδόν καθόλου) αλλά το συγκεκριμένο μου κίνησε την περιέργεια. Αφενός μεν η αγάπη μου για τα ψυχροπολεμικά θρίλερ αφετέρου δε οι έντονες πολιτικές συγκρούσεις που βιώνουμε στην καθημερινότητα, πολλές εκ των οποίων είναι απόρροια της ψυχροπολεμικής περιόδου. Συνεπώς το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο είναι ένα άκρως ενδιαφέρον ανάγνωσμα, ειδικά για τους νεώτερους που δεν έζησαν κάποια από αυτά τα περιστατικά.

Κάνοντας μια προσπάθεια να είναι αποστασιοποιημένος ο συγγραφέας περιγράφει την περίοδο του ψυχρού πολέμου, τηρώντας υποτυπώδεις αποστάσεις και όσο πιο απλά γίνεται. Δεν εμβαθύνει σε πολιτικο-οικονομικές αναλύσεις που ενδεχομένως να έκαναν το βιβλίο δύσκολο για τον μη έμπειρο αναγνώστη αλλά διατηρεί απλή γραφή προσπαθώντας να μη γίνεται όμως απλοϊκός.

Συνοψίζοντας το βιβλίο είναι μια καλή αρχή για όποιον δεν γνωρίζει την περίοδο αυτή, προκειμένου να αποκτήσει μια ιδέα για το πως κύλησε ο ρους της ιστορίας και (γιατί όχι) να προβληματιστεί για το κατά πόσο μάθαμε το μάθημα μας (ως ανθρωπότητα) και αν εν τέλει η ιστορία επαναλαμβάνεται.

[Marcus Pacenza · Rating 1 out of 5]

John Lewis Gaddis sets out in this book to push the narrative that the Cold War represented the ultimate triumph of good vs evil, with the evil Soviet Union and its cronies being defeated by the righteous forces of Capitalism. Not only does this narrative require intentional ignorance of many of the United States' most offensive imperialist crimes and underplaying the successes of communist ideology, it also leads Gaddis to make a laughably bad prognosis of the state of humanity post Cold War. "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for the conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end." The fact that basically every part of this statement has been proven false, just 15 years after the publication of this book, shows how a false view of history leads to a false view of the present and the future. If this book is the best summary of the Cold War available today, then historians still have a lot of work to do.

[Breanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was beyond amazing! Very clear and concise! If you want a run down of the Cold War I would recommend this book! Seriously, this will forever be my go-to on the topic.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

My 2009 booklog says "A+, masterful." OK, let's see what else I have:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/boo...
"...require[s] a scholar of extraordinary gifts to tell why nine cold-war presidents deployed our national treasure against an empire that broke apart so clumsily in the end.

John Lewis Gaddis is that scholar, and "The Cold War: A New History" is the book they should read. A professor of history at Yale, Gaddis is the author of six renowned volumes on the cold war -- especially the strategies of both sides -- that were written during or shortly after the struggle."
[2006 NYT review]

It's interesting, and saddening, how hopeful we were about the "New World Order" back then. Mostly back to the "Same Old Shit" now....

Discounting my 2009 rating accordingly, to 4 stars.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The target audience of this book is the generation younger than me that has the Cold War as a historical event rather than part of their lives. As that, it is fairly well written, targeted well, and concise. Perhaps a bit too concise. The whole premise of the book comes off feeling as if decades passed without anything happening, then Ronald Reagan, the great professional actor comes and saves the day. The author clearly admires that particular president, and his usually restrained prose waxes ebullient when President Reagan reaches the stage. I don't have any strong dislike of him, but when the author uses a paragraph to say that the Pope and Reagan were both shot and it is a good thing the President didn't die, because we would still be in the Cold War, one begins to wonder if his enthusiasm hasn't taken himself a bit too far. If there were one other idea that he seems too fixated upon is this idea of Marxist infallibility. Somehow, that is supposedly the core idea that held the whole system together and when Stalin fell out of favor of the party, that was the beginning of the end.

[Paul D. Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprisingly moving little book on the Cold War by its foremost historian. Gaddis has spent a lifetime writing about the Cold War, and this is brief, highly-readable summary of the whole thing. I wished for more: this isn't a thousand-page magisterial opus, but a 250-page essay by a historian firmly in command of his craft and content to summarize the big conclusions of his life's study.

The final chapter and epilogue wax lyrical about the power of human hope, and I remembered being seven years old and practicing duck-and-cover drills in the second grade, being eleven years old watching the Berlin Wall fall on TV and trying to understand why my parents were so excited and so relieved and so happy, and being thirteen years old watching the Soviet Union collapse and starting to have an inkling. The Cold War was a great and terrible thing, and it is a blessing beyond measure that it ended when and how it did.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a great read because of the analytic views and the synthesis. Striking is the importance Gaddis accords to the protagonists of the 1980s, whilst he gives less attention to the structural backgrounds. In my view the importance of Reagan is exaggerated.

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate giving any book a one star but this book was that bad. Very poorly written. Subject matter jumped all over the place. I wouldn't bother with this one.

[Michael Kotsarinis]

I found this book very interesting and quite easy to read. It doesn't deal with exhaustive lists of facts, dates and persons or the minutiae of the Cold War but paints a broad picture of it. It certainly doesn't miss any of key events but it tries to put everything into perspective and show the underlying relations. I particularly liked the effort to explain the rationale behind the decisions of the key players and the predominant way of thinking.

[Jeremy Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The apex of historical nonfiction books. The effort and ability required to synthesize a decades-long global era into 300 pages is awe-inspiring. It would be so easy and appropriate to write another 300 pages - I respect the mission to make the topic that much more accessible. Every sentence is informative and purposeful. It was such an effort to read this book and I loved every minute. I learned so much more than I was hoping.

Top 2 favorite book covering a historical topic - tied with Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes.

[Jason Herrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overview of the relationship between the US & USSR from end of WWII until collapse of the USSR. This helped fill in some holes for me & explain those areas of history that we never got to in HS or college.

[Hannah Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terrible, and it's nothing short of horrifying that it's at the top of so many people's recommendations for entry-level books about the Cold War.

Gaddis claims that his aims for the book were to talk about what it was "really like" to be alive during the Cold War, but the only viewpoint he represents is that of a straight, white, conservative, financially-stable man who doesn't know anybody in a union. He has nothing but glowing praise for capitalism and nothing but condemnation for Those Dirty Commies. His criticism of the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union may be fair, but it's hard not to take anything and everything he says with a grain of salt when he seems to reluctant to speak ill of the United States and their crimes against humanity during this period. One single chapter is devoted to the crimes committed by the US during the Cold War, and they are framed as unfortunate moral backslides that occurred solely out of the need to set up an effective defense against the Evils of Communism. The Civil Rights movement is barely mentioned. Mccarthyism is not mentioned by name once in the entire book. The author has nothing but praise for Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, of all people. Would it shock you to know that Gaddis worked for the Bush administration, by the way?

The only good thing this book did for me was that it made me want to seek out other, better books about the subject.

[Alexandru · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book were really good. But then other parts felt disjointed or don't have a place in a history book.

The book starts with the story of the Cold War, Stalin, the Korean War and Kruschev with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But then it goes on a detour analysing communism and capitalism to only then jump back to the story of the Cold War.

The best part was the ending of the Cold War and the interaction between Reagan and Gorbachev. Interestingly, the author believes both the USA and USSR were enjoying their detente and the establishment actually preferred the continuation of the Cold War. But these two new leaders both wanted to change things and actually end the Cold War.

There's a full chapter dedicated to the benefits of capitalism vs the ills of communism. While I generally agree with most of the analysis and I abhor communism, I don't think we needed a whole chapter like that in a history book.

In the end this is quite a short book and at 350 odd pages there's nowhere near enough time to cover all the great conflicts of the Cold War. The conflicts in Africa and South America were barely covered.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Хороша оглядова книжка. Автор поєднує хронологічний підхід з тематичним, тому це не виглядає як лише розповідь про послідовність фактів. Книжка явно підтримує Америку та союзників у протистоянні, і це добре. Але при цьому в мене все одно склалось враження, що Радянський Союз був більш миролюбним, ніж сучасна Росія. Крім того, керівництво СРСР було менш відірване від реальності: озброєні інтервенції вони виконували тільки тоді, коли поставлені цілі були реалістичними, а Захід не особливо заперечував. Коли ж цих умов не було дотримано (вторгнення в Афганістан), Союз швидко втратив інтерес до інтервенцій, а потім і зовсім розвалився. Цього бажаємо й Росії тепер, і бажано пошвидше.

[Natalie Casella · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gaddis is revisionist historian. This book reads as a praise hymnal for Reagan rather than an expository history of the cold war and the atrocities committed by our nation.

[Max Nova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gaddis does it again. The Cold War: A New History is an eminently readable account of the Cold War that places it in a larger historical, ideological, and strategic context. If you're alive today, you should probably read this book so that you can understand where we're coming from.

I'm not quite sure what it is about Gaddis's style, but this book reads much more like a novel than a dry history book. And of course, he manages to sneak in some of the Grand Strategy reading list too - from Thucydides to Machiavelli and Clausewitz.

I've included some of the best passages from the book below:

### Rebuilding Europe ###
The British would attempt to influence the Americans as much as possible—they aspired to the role of Greeks, tutoring the new Romans—but under no circumstances would they get at odds with the Americans.

Not only did Soviet troops expropriate property and extract reparations on an indiscriminate scale, but they also indulged in mass rape—some 2 million German women suffered this fate between 1945 and 1947.24

Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

And when several recipients of Marshall Plan aid pointed out that self-confidence could hardly be attained without military protection, the Americans agreed to provide this too in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first peacetime military alliance the United States had entered into since the termination, in 1800, of the one with France that had secured American independence.


### Grand strategy in the atomic age ###
This grim trend led the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, writing in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, to warn that states resorting to unlimited violence could be consumed by it. If the object of war was to secure the state—how could it not be?—then wars had to be limited: that is what Clausewitz meant when he insisted that war is “a continuation of political activity by other means. . . . The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.” States themselves could become the victims of war if weapons ever became so destructive that they placed at risk the purposes for which wars were being fought. Any resort to force, under such circumstances, could destroy what it was meant to defend.

As the means of fighting great wars became exponentially more devastating, the likelihood of such wars diminished, and ultimately disappeared altogether. Contrary to the lesson Thucydides drew from the greatest war of his time, human nature did change—and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began the process by which it did so.

Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around… That stark fact caused this ordinary man to do an extraordinary thing. He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used.

Apart from the single instance of the Berlin blockade, it is difficult to see that the United States got any political advantages from its nuclear monopoly. “They frighten [us] with the atomic bomb, but we are not afraid of it,” Stalin assured the same Chinese he had warned about the dangers of risking war.20 The claim may not have been true, but Stalin’s strategy made sense: he had shrewdly calculated that, short of war itself, the atomic bomb was an almost unusable weapon.

There was, thus, no direct Soviet-American military confrontation over Korea—or so it appeared for many years. Recent evidence, however, has required revising this conclusion, for one other thing Stalin did was to authorize the use of Soviet fighter planes, manned by Soviet pilots, over the Korean peninsula—where they encountered American fighters flown by American pilots. And so there was, after all, a shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union: it was the only time this happened during the Cold War. Both sides, however, kept it quiet. The Soviet Union never publicized its involvement in these air battles, and the United States, which was well aware of it, chose not to do so either. The two superpowers had found it necessary but also dangerous to be in combat with one another. They tacitly agreed, therefore, on a cover-up.

In the end, as the president saw it, if the United States could build what was now coming to be called a “hydrogen” bomb, then it must build one. To be behind in any category of weaponry—or even to appear to be—would risk disaster. The problem now was not so much how to defeat an adversary as how to convince him not to go to war in the first place. Paradoxically, that seemed to require the development of weapons so powerful that no one on the American side knew what their military uses might be, while simultaneously persuading everyone on the Soviet side that if the war did come those weapons would without doubt be employed.

### Ideology ###
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us,” Kennan told students at the National War College in 1947. “It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down. . . . If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.” This warning from the founder of containment—that the enemy to be contained might as easily lie within the beneficiaries of freedom as among its enemies—showed how pervasive fear had become in a postwar international order for which there had been so much hope. It helps to explain why Orwell’s 1984, when it appeared in 1949, became an instant literary triumph.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech of January, 1918, the single most influential statement of an American ideology in the 20th century, was a direct response to the ideological challenge Lenin had posed.

The reasons had less to do with any fundamental shift in the means of production, as a Marxist historian might have argued, than with a striking shift in the attitude of the United States toward the international system. Despite having built the world’s most powerful and diversified economy, Americans had shown remarkably little interest, prior to 1941, in how the rest of the world was governed. Repressive regimes elsewhere might be regrettable, but they could hardly harm the United States. Even involvement in World War I had failed to alter this attitude, as Wilson discovered to his embarrassment and chagrin. What did change it, immediately and irrevocably, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. That event shattered the illusion that distance ensured safety: that it did not matter who ran what on the other side of the ocean. The nation’s security was now at risk, and because future aggressors with air and naval power could well follow the Japanese example, the problem was not likely to go away. There was little choice, then, but for the United States to assume global responsibilities. Those required winning the war against Japan and Germany—Hitler having declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor—but they also meant planning a postwar world in which democracy and capitalism would be secure.

Not only had capitalism generated social inequality, as Marx had predicted it would. By this line of reasoning, it had also produced two world wars.

BOTH OF the ideologies that defined those worlds were meant to offer hope: that is why one has an ideology in the first place. One of them, however, had come to depend, for its functioning, upon the creation of fear. The other had no need to do so. Therein lay the basic ideological asymmetry of the Cold War.

By that time, one historian has estimated, the Stalinist dictatorship had either ended or wrecked the lives of between 10 and 11 million Soviet citizens—all for the purpose of maintaining itself in power.

But that meant accepting the proposition that Stalin himself was the font of all wisdom and common sense, claims his acolytes made frequently during the final years of his life. Whether he believed them or not, the “greatest genius of mankind” was in fact a lonely, deluded, and fearful old man, addicted to ill-informed pontifications on genetics, economics, philosophy, and linguistics, to long drunken dinners with terrified subordinates, and—oddly—to American movies. “I’m finished,” he acknowledged in a moment of candor shortly before his death. “I don’t even trust myself.”

But the system he was trying to preserve had itself been based, since the time of Marx and Engels, on the claim to be error-free. That was what it meant to have discovered the engine that drove history forward. A movement based on science had little place for confession, contrition, and the possibility of redemption. The problems Khrushchev created for himself and for the international communist movement, therefore, began almost from the moment he finished speaking.

Mao took a different path. His principal theoretical innovation was to claim that peasants were proletarians: that they did not have to be transformed.

Accordingly, Mao added to his industrialization and collectivization campaigns his own purge of potential dissidents. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” he proclaimed ; but then he arrested as “rightists” those critics unwise enough to have taken him at his word. It was a strategy designed to “coax the snakes out of their holes, . . . to let the poisonous weeds grow first and then destroy them one by one. Let them become fertilizer.”

The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever. So Mao did wind up surpassing the Soviet Union and everyone else in at least one category. But it was not one of which the ideologists of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, or Maoism could be proud.

This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history.

### NIXON AND THE CIA ####
But the nation would soon see Nixon haunted again, this time irreversibly, not by Vietnamese insurgents or radical students but by the legal consequences of a petty burglary that would drive him from office. The rule of law, within the United States at least, outweighed the accomplishments of grand strategy.

The claim was not a new one. Every chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt had sanctioned acts of questionable legality in the interests of national security, and Abraham Lincoln had done so more flagrantly than any of them in order to preserve national unity. Nixon, however, made several mistakes that were distinctly his own. The first was to exaggerate the problem confronting him: the leaking of The Pentagon Papers to the New York Times was not a threat comparable to secession in 1861, or to the prospect of subversion during World War II and the early Cold War. Nixon’s second mistake was to employ such clumsy agents that they got themselves caught. And his third mistake—the one that ended his presidency—was to lie about what he had done in a futile attempt to cover it up.

AMERICAN officials were, at first, reasonably confident that they could contain the Soviet Union and international communism without abandoning standards of behavior drawn from their own domestic experience. They believed firmly that aggression was linked to autocracy, and that a stable international order could best be built upon such principles as freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of enterprise, and freedom of political choice. “The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations,” Kennan wrote in the summer of 1947. “To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test . . . than this.

The newly established Central Intelligence Agency had neither the capability nor the authority at the time to conduct covert operations : such was the relative innocence of the era. But with the State Department’s encouragement, it stepped into the breach... Shortly thereafter, the National Security Council expanded the role of the C.I.A. to include propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

Kennan insisted that the State Department monitor C.I.A. activities to ensure that “plausible deniability” would not mean the lifting of all restraints... As Kennan later admitted : “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.”

The expanding scale and audacity of covert operations led Kennan to admit, years later, that recommending them had been “the greatest mistake I ever made.”

“[W]e are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination,” the Doolittle Report, a highly classified evaluation of C.I.A. covert operations, concluded in 1954. “There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” … And so the Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians.

“I can say unequivocally,” Nixon wrote after resigning the presidency, “that without secrecy there would have been no opening to China, no SALT agreement with the Soviet Union, and no peace agreement ending the Vietnam war.” There is little reason to doubt that claim. ...Where Nixon went wrong was not in his use of secrecy to conduct foreign policy—diplomacy had always required that—but in failing to distinguish between actions he could have justified if exposed and those he could never have justified.

### Beginning of the end of Communism in Europe ###
His problem was that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, like all other ruling communist parties, drew its authority from its claim to historical infallibility: that left it vulnerable when events failed to follow the script.

Helsinki became, in short, a legal and moral trap. Having pressed the United States and its allies to commit themselves in writing to recognizing existing boundaries in Eastern Europe, Brezhnev could hardly repudiate what he had agreed to in the same document—also in writing—with respect to human rights. Without realizing the implications, he thereby handed his critics a standard, based on universal principles of justice, rooted in international law, independent of Marxist-Leninist ideology, against which they could evaluate the behavior of his and other communist regimes.

Real power rested, during the final decade of the Cold War, with leaders like John Paul II, whose mastery of intangibles—of such qualities as courage, eloquence, imagination, determination, and faith—allowed them to expose disparities between what people believed and the systems under which the Cold War had obliged them to live. The gaps were most glaring in the Marxist-Leninist world: so much so that when fully revealed there was no way to close them other than to dismantle communism itself, and thereby end the Cold War.

### Reagan and Gorbachev ###
Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever. His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity. And what he saw was simply this: that because détente perpetuated—and had been meant to perpetuate—the Cold War, only killing détente could end the Cold War.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Gorbachev acknowledged his failure. “The Achilles heel of socialism was the inability to link the socialist goal with the provision of incentives for efficient labor and the encouragement of initiative on the part of individuals. It became clear in practice that a market provides such incentives best of all.”
But German reunification was, nonetheless, an unsettling prospect, not just for the Soviet Union but for all Europeans who remembered the record of the last unified German state.
Gorbachev was never a leader in the manner of Václav Havel, John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa—even Boris Yeltsin. They all had destinations in mind and maps for reaching them. Gorbachev dithered in contradictions without resolving them… He chose love over fear, violating Machiavelli’s advice for princes and thereby ensuring that he ceased to be one.

### Parting Notes ###
Columbus’s reputation, in turn, would hardly have been what it was had it not been for the decision of the Hongxi emperor, in 1424, to suspend China’s far more costly and ambitious program of maritime exploration, thus leaving the great discoveries to the Europeans. A strange decision, one might think, until one recalls the costly and ambitious American effort to outdo the Soviet Union by placing a man on the moon, completed triumphantly on July 20, 1969. It had been, President Nixon extravagantly boasted, “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” But then, after only five more moon landings over the next three and a half years, Nixon suspended the manned exploration of space altogether, leaving future discoveries to be postponed indefinitely. Which emperor’s behavior will seem stranger 500 years hence? It is difficult to say.

The Cold War may well be remembered, then, as the point at which military strength, a defining characteristic of “power” itself for the past five centuries, ceased to be that. The Soviet Union collapsed, after all, with its military forces, even its nuclear capabilities, fully intact.

[Sivasothi N. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly accessible book and a great introduction to the elements which contributed to The Cold War, a period of considerable dread which didn’t come to pass, and which ended in a euphoric dismantling of the repressive command economies of autocratic socialism.

If you lived through this time, you’ll find the most fascinating chapter to be the one on how smaller states manipulated the big powers to ensure their own agendas. Not entirely puppets!

Read this amidst marking papers and the seven self contained short chapters were a wonderful way to rest and read. Strongly recommended for younger folks who hear about the Cold War but don’t exactly know what it was about, because it is so much part of the international psyche today. And because we enter a new phase once again, with US-China-Russia. Here we go again.

I read it because of Matt’s review; Goodreads is useful that way! An ebook from NLB read on Libby on my phone.

[Cgcang · Rating 5 out of 5]

There probably are numerous points to disagree with, and at least one application of creative license that almost made me drop one star, but the book itself is comprehensive, very well written and ideal for beginners. Not enough on its own, but an important step towards being introduced to the history of the Cold War.