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The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
A brilliant young historian offers a vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War in which he views the decade-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the twentieth century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was.
In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.
A superb work of scholarship illustrated with four maps, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is the first global military history of this superpower conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare.
Chamberlin reframes this era in global history and explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and determine the fate of societies throughout the Third World.
In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.
A superb work of scholarship illustrated with four maps, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is the first global military history of this superpower conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare.
Chamberlin reframes this era in global history and explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and determine the fate of societies throughout the Third World.
640 pages, Hardcover
First published July 3, 2018
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April 19, 2024
“The half century after the end of World War II fundamentally transformed the world. For the United States, Europe, and Russia, the Cold War effectively defeated the Marxist revolutionary challenge and left capitalism as the reigning political-economic system. But events played out very differently in the Third World. There, the Cold War helped destroy European colonialism, creating dozens of independent states at the same time that it fueled mass violence that killed more than twenty million people and gutted the forces of moderate secular nationalism. Ultimately, both stories are critical to understanding the Cold War era and the twenty-first-century international order. The ferocious violence of the Cold War’s killing fields was every bit as central to the making of the contemporary world as Europe’s long peace…”
- Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
The Cold War has often been called “the long peace.” In one sense – an important sense – it’s true. War between the then-dominant powers of the United States and the Soviet Union never occurred. The worst case scenario – a skirmish in Berlin, Soviet tanks flooding westward, NATO lobbing tactical nukes to slow their passage through the Fulda Gap, Russia responding with ICMBs, the United States unleashing its insane single integrated operational plan – did not happen, meaning that hundreds of millions of people did not die, and Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and North America were not turned into irradiated wastelands where – to use an old saying favored by Nikita Khrushchev – the survivors would envy the dead.
Nevertheless, as Paul Thomas Chamberlin reminds us in The Cold War’s Killing Fields, the so-called “long peace” was pretty deadly.
According to Chamberlin, roughly twenty million people died in wars and genocides following the end of the Second World War. Of that total, fourteen million deaths took place in “a nearly contiguous belt of territory running from the Manchurian Plain in the east, south into Indochina’s lush rain forests, and west across the arid plateaus of Central Asia and the Middle East.” As Chamberlin notes on the very first page, seven out of ten conflict-caused fatalities between 1945 and 1990 happened in this zone.
It is these “killing fields” that are the focus of Chamberlin’s book. Unlike other Cold War histories, which dwell on Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, The Cold War’s Killing Fields goes to where most of the violence unfolded.
***
The Cold War’s Killing Fields is divided into three parts, covering the sometimes-overlapping eras of 1945-1954, 1964-1979, and 1975-1990. These sections correspond to three different waves of bloodletting, each with their own characteristics.
The first took place as a consequence of the collapse of Japan’s empire, setting in motion a string of revolutions, the one in China being only the largest. The second wave began in the 1960s, when North Vietnam resumed their war against the American-backed government in Saigon. The resulting Vietnamese-American War – fought by the U.S. under the premises of the “domino theory” – ended up reshaping Southeast Asia is ways that no one prophesied. The final wave took place in the Middle East and – as Chamberlin acknowledges – doesn’t fit neatly into the Cold War paradigm. Instead of left-wing revolutionaries indoctrinated in Marx, influenced by Mao and Che, and committed to the overthrow of capitalism, this stage saw the appearance of sectarian clashes that broke as much along religious fault lines as economic ones.
Within this structure, Chamberlin takes a mostly chronological approach, narrating events as they unfolded, rather than lumping things together by geography. In practice, to take one example, this means that an event such as the war in Vietnam takes place in several different chapters, rather than in one big one. This requires one to pay a bit of attention, but works because Chamberlin keeps the reader well oriented in time.
***
In terms of coverage, The Cold War’s Killing Fields tries to capture a lot in 560 pages of text. This includes the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Indochinese Wars, the India-Pakistan War, the Cambodian genocide, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Each of these topics is massive in and of itself, but Chamberlin does a masterful job of summarizing them without simplifying, while simultaneously providing enough detail to be engaging. In particular, I thought Chamberlin did an exceptional job of tracing the unsettling of Cambodia, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the awful massacres that followed. Likewise, he is able to disentangle the complex knot of Lebanon, allowing the reader to follow the many lethal threads that turned beautiful Beirut – the onetime Paris of the Middle East – into a slaughterhouse.
***
As Chamberlin fully admits, this is not a work of original scholarship, based on newly discovered evidence, recently declassified documents, or original interviews. Rather, this is a synthesis and distillation of previous research. While a lot of what Chamberlin covers is familiar, there is a real value in taking the broad view, and seeing how all the interlocking pieces fit, move, and affect each other.
One good example of this is the wars in Vietnam. Generally speaking – and in the United States in particular – the Vietnamese-American War is seen as a deadly and embarrassing failure, one that squandered lives and money, fractured civil society, and nearly destroyed one of America’s two major political parties.
There is a good deal of truth in this. However, as Chamberlin points out, this judgment changes slightly when you step back a bit, and look at the entire sequence, rather than just one point on the timeline. This wider-angle shows how – after sending America packing – Vietnam ended up fighting the Cambodians and the Chinese, the latter of whom had backed them against the United States. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the mass murder of the Indonesian Communist Party – the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI – brutally snuffed out any communist hopes in the vast archipelago. The end result of this sequence of events is that America’s geopolitical position in the region was strengthened, rather than weakened, despite Saigon’s fall. Whether this was worthwhile or justified, of course, is an entirely different matter.
***
There are many ways of looking at the Cold War: as an armed truce between superpowers; as the spasms of post-colonial revolutionary violence; or as a proxy struggle, in which client states often led their putative sponsors around by the nose. Chamberlin draws on all of this in his reframing.
To the extent Chamberlin is setting forth an argument, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is not necessarily objective. Nevertheless, it is balanced, showing in great detail the crimes and misjudgments of all the participants. This has the nuance that is often missing in historical discussions of late, which seem intent on dividing the good from the bad, and the perpetrators from the victim, ignoring the well-documented reality than one entity could be – and often was – all these things at once.
***
Generally speaking, the Cold War is viewed as a standoff between two superpowers in a bi-polar world, which ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The conventional wisdom is that between 1991-2001, there was a brief, unique interregnum in which the United States reigned as the sole superpower in a unipolar world.
This “holiday from history” ended in a heap of steel, glass, and the dust of atomized bodies in Lower Manhattan, after which opened a chapter often called “the Age of Terror.” Over the course of twenty years, America embarked on disastrous Middle Eastern incursions, wasting lives, money, and moral prestige. As this happened, China became a superpower in its own right, while Russia returned to its imperial roots. Now we’re living in a multipolar world in the midst of a new cold war, one in which a lot more players have nukes.
In The Cold War’s Killing Fields, Chamberlin shows – rather compellingly – that the Cold War, the Age of Terror, and the Age of the Darkest Timeline we’re in now, are not discrete moments. Instead, he demonstrates how they have flowed one from the other, a tide of murder and destructions and waste that has brought us inexorably back to the most dangerous days of the 1960s and 1980s.
- Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
The Cold War has often been called “the long peace.” In one sense – an important sense – it’s true. War between the then-dominant powers of the United States and the Soviet Union never occurred. The worst case scenario – a skirmish in Berlin, Soviet tanks flooding westward, NATO lobbing tactical nukes to slow their passage through the Fulda Gap, Russia responding with ICMBs, the United States unleashing its insane single integrated operational plan – did not happen, meaning that hundreds of millions of people did not die, and Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and North America were not turned into irradiated wastelands where – to use an old saying favored by Nikita Khrushchev – the survivors would envy the dead.
Nevertheless, as Paul Thomas Chamberlin reminds us in The Cold War’s Killing Fields, the so-called “long peace” was pretty deadly.
According to Chamberlin, roughly twenty million people died in wars and genocides following the end of the Second World War. Of that total, fourteen million deaths took place in “a nearly contiguous belt of territory running from the Manchurian Plain in the east, south into Indochina’s lush rain forests, and west across the arid plateaus of Central Asia and the Middle East.” As Chamberlin notes on the very first page, seven out of ten conflict-caused fatalities between 1945 and 1990 happened in this zone.
It is these “killing fields” that are the focus of Chamberlin’s book. Unlike other Cold War histories, which dwell on Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, The Cold War’s Killing Fields goes to where most of the violence unfolded.
***
The Cold War’s Killing Fields is divided into three parts, covering the sometimes-overlapping eras of 1945-1954, 1964-1979, and 1975-1990. These sections correspond to three different waves of bloodletting, each with their own characteristics.
The first took place as a consequence of the collapse of Japan’s empire, setting in motion a string of revolutions, the one in China being only the largest. The second wave began in the 1960s, when North Vietnam resumed their war against the American-backed government in Saigon. The resulting Vietnamese-American War – fought by the U.S. under the premises of the “domino theory” – ended up reshaping Southeast Asia is ways that no one prophesied. The final wave took place in the Middle East and – as Chamberlin acknowledges – doesn’t fit neatly into the Cold War paradigm. Instead of left-wing revolutionaries indoctrinated in Marx, influenced by Mao and Che, and committed to the overthrow of capitalism, this stage saw the appearance of sectarian clashes that broke as much along religious fault lines as economic ones.
Within this structure, Chamberlin takes a mostly chronological approach, narrating events as they unfolded, rather than lumping things together by geography. In practice, to take one example, this means that an event such as the war in Vietnam takes place in several different chapters, rather than in one big one. This requires one to pay a bit of attention, but works because Chamberlin keeps the reader well oriented in time.
***
In terms of coverage, The Cold War’s Killing Fields tries to capture a lot in 560 pages of text. This includes the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Indochinese Wars, the India-Pakistan War, the Cambodian genocide, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Each of these topics is massive in and of itself, but Chamberlin does a masterful job of summarizing them without simplifying, while simultaneously providing enough detail to be engaging. In particular, I thought Chamberlin did an exceptional job of tracing the unsettling of Cambodia, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the awful massacres that followed. Likewise, he is able to disentangle the complex knot of Lebanon, allowing the reader to follow the many lethal threads that turned beautiful Beirut – the onetime Paris of the Middle East – into a slaughterhouse.
***
As Chamberlin fully admits, this is not a work of original scholarship, based on newly discovered evidence, recently declassified documents, or original interviews. Rather, this is a synthesis and distillation of previous research. While a lot of what Chamberlin covers is familiar, there is a real value in taking the broad view, and seeing how all the interlocking pieces fit, move, and affect each other.
One good example of this is the wars in Vietnam. Generally speaking – and in the United States in particular – the Vietnamese-American War is seen as a deadly and embarrassing failure, one that squandered lives and money, fractured civil society, and nearly destroyed one of America’s two major political parties.
There is a good deal of truth in this. However, as Chamberlin points out, this judgment changes slightly when you step back a bit, and look at the entire sequence, rather than just one point on the timeline. This wider-angle shows how – after sending America packing – Vietnam ended up fighting the Cambodians and the Chinese, the latter of whom had backed them against the United States. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the mass murder of the Indonesian Communist Party – the Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI – brutally snuffed out any communist hopes in the vast archipelago. The end result of this sequence of events is that America’s geopolitical position in the region was strengthened, rather than weakened, despite Saigon’s fall. Whether this was worthwhile or justified, of course, is an entirely different matter.
***
There are many ways of looking at the Cold War: as an armed truce between superpowers; as the spasms of post-colonial revolutionary violence; or as a proxy struggle, in which client states often led their putative sponsors around by the nose. Chamberlin draws on all of this in his reframing.
To the extent Chamberlin is setting forth an argument, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is not necessarily objective. Nevertheless, it is balanced, showing in great detail the crimes and misjudgments of all the participants. This has the nuance that is often missing in historical discussions of late, which seem intent on dividing the good from the bad, and the perpetrators from the victim, ignoring the well-documented reality than one entity could be – and often was – all these things at once.
***
Generally speaking, the Cold War is viewed as a standoff between two superpowers in a bi-polar world, which ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The conventional wisdom is that between 1991-2001, there was a brief, unique interregnum in which the United States reigned as the sole superpower in a unipolar world.
This “holiday from history” ended in a heap of steel, glass, and the dust of atomized bodies in Lower Manhattan, after which opened a chapter often called “the Age of Terror.” Over the course of twenty years, America embarked on disastrous Middle Eastern incursions, wasting lives, money, and moral prestige. As this happened, China became a superpower in its own right, while Russia returned to its imperial roots. Now we’re living in a multipolar world in the midst of a new cold war, one in which a lot more players have nukes.
In The Cold War’s Killing Fields, Chamberlin shows – rather compellingly – that the Cold War, the Age of Terror, and the Age of the Darkest Timeline we’re in now, are not discrete moments. Instead, he demonstrates how they have flowed one from the other, a tide of murder and destructions and waste that has brought us inexorably back to the most dangerous days of the 1960s and 1980s.
July 2, 2018
If you have done your due diligence with the Cold War there is not a lot that is new in this book. It is easy enough to read and will keep readers engaged. The thesis is that the Cold War tensions between the superpowers exacerbated small scale conflicts eventually leading to ethnic and religious conflicts and increasing loss of life. This is not too new of a thesis, but it is good for the general public to have a new, accessible book that focuses on conflicts in Indonesia, Cambodia, Lebanon and the Iran-Iraq War in addition to the more frequently covered Korea and Vietnam. The author is not always giving a thoughtful examination of the motives of the superpowers and tends to rely on "Western" historians. He finds the US and USSR to make constant mistakes and be instrumental in allowing for or creating worse situations. While this is certainly valid it would be better history with more weighing of different perspectives.
June 4, 2019
I am struggling a bit with the framing argument - that the so-called “Long Peace” is a misnomer born of Eurocentric (or at least Western-focused) thinking. True enough as far as it goes, but I’m not sure the facts and narrative of this history supported the corollary premise that the violence that swept through Asia in the latter 20th century was the proxy violence of the Cold War. I do agree with the overall framework of three general waves of violence, but they don’t so much seem to have been caused by the Cold War as worsened or in some cases metastasized by it. Further, there’s something a little bit imperialistic in describing the various struggles of hundreds of millions of people pursuing their own local and international goals through the narrow prism of the U.S. v. the Soviet Union. Although the false premises and bipolar insanity that locked those two players into their Prisoners’ Dilemma did spill out into the rest of the world, it did not (at least from the narrative presented in this book) cause them. Instead, it spilled out in the form of almost unlimited weapons and money to fuel independently-arising or pre-existing conflicts around the globe.
The first wave of violence seems to have been a late grab for statehood - the last of the great nations coalescing and taking their place (China obviously, Korea less successfully and still inconclusively). The second appears to have been primarily the fallout of post-colonialism, turbo charged by the injection of modern weaponry and superpower support. But whereas the first wave of violence was indeed driven at least in part by playing off Cold War brinksmanship, the second was many different things in many different places. What happened in Indonesia is not what happened in Cambodia, and neither had a whole lot to do with either the U.S. or Russia. Pakistan and Bangladesh and even Afghanistan had far more to do with India; they only Cold War involvement was material support for pre-existing conflicts. I also was not sure the conflict in Lebanon deserved the amount of coverage given in relation to the other parts of the book. Was it really the pivot that presaged the fundamental shift in warfare? Why? Other states descended into anarchy too, but they are not even mentioned. True there were sectarian overtones to the conflict, as would reoccur throughout the Middle East, but it was also a secular struggle. And it did not seem to have a whole lot to do with the Cold War. Sure it was a proxy war - but the players were Iran, Syria, Israel, not the U.S. or Russia. And I did not really follow how Lebanon led anywhere except back into itself. Afghanistan, on the other hand, bore bitter fruit tasted to this day the world over.
So, I guess what I am saying is that this was a fabulously researched, detailed, thoroughly engrossing book. I’m just not sure the facts or narrative presented supported the alleged premise or argument. But ultimately that is fine, because the argument was not really pressed very often and so could be for the most part forgotten in favor of following a very good history of postcolonial revolution and violence (as it intersected with Western Cold War politics) in Asia in the latter half of the 20th century.
The first wave of violence seems to have been a late grab for statehood - the last of the great nations coalescing and taking their place (China obviously, Korea less successfully and still inconclusively). The second appears to have been primarily the fallout of post-colonialism, turbo charged by the injection of modern weaponry and superpower support. But whereas the first wave of violence was indeed driven at least in part by playing off Cold War brinksmanship, the second was many different things in many different places. What happened in Indonesia is not what happened in Cambodia, and neither had a whole lot to do with either the U.S. or Russia. Pakistan and Bangladesh and even Afghanistan had far more to do with India; they only Cold War involvement was material support for pre-existing conflicts. I also was not sure the conflict in Lebanon deserved the amount of coverage given in relation to the other parts of the book. Was it really the pivot that presaged the fundamental shift in warfare? Why? Other states descended into anarchy too, but they are not even mentioned. True there were sectarian overtones to the conflict, as would reoccur throughout the Middle East, but it was also a secular struggle. And it did not seem to have a whole lot to do with the Cold War. Sure it was a proxy war - but the players were Iran, Syria, Israel, not the U.S. or Russia. And I did not really follow how Lebanon led anywhere except back into itself. Afghanistan, on the other hand, bore bitter fruit tasted to this day the world over.
So, I guess what I am saying is that this was a fabulously researched, detailed, thoroughly engrossing book. I’m just not sure the facts or narrative presented supported the alleged premise or argument. But ultimately that is fine, because the argument was not really pressed very often and so could be for the most part forgotten in favor of following a very good history of postcolonial revolution and violence (as it intersected with Western Cold War politics) in Asia in the latter half of the 20th century.
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March 12, 2024First I'll admit I only read the first 3 chapters, and probably will not read the rest anytime soon, so I'm not in the position to rate this book objectively (at least according to my standard). With that said, here're some thoughts:
Because I'm very familiar with the last stage of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1950), I feel I can critique this section better.
I wish that the Cold War had never happened, could it have been avoided? I don't know. In that later stage of WWII, Mao offered to visit US (possibly with Zhou) multiple times, but there were no official responses from the US. Was it because of FDR's health or diplomats or other people? We would never know what could have been.
The author correctly mentioned the military struggle between GMD (or formerly called KMT from old method of spelling) and CCP started in 1927, and the invasion by Japan in 1937 interrupted it. 1945 was a pivotal year in modern Chinese history. In October, 1945, there's a tentative agreement between the 2 parties, in which GMD agreed to share power with CCP to a limited degree, and CCP agreed to give up the areas it controlled south of the Yangtze River (several relatively small areas).
To be frank and understandably, there was very deep suspicion between them. In late 1945, CCP decided to take Manchuria as the no. 1 priority. Before that, the area was occupied by Japan for 14 years, and Japan was just defeated by the Soviet forces in August, 1945. Neither party had presence there. In their calculation, in the worst-case scenario, even if they lost everywhere else, they could always retreat to Manchuria. At this time, most of CCP's military forces were in northern and eastern China. And GMD's forces were mainly in southwestern China, very far from Manchuria. That's why Chiang ordered the Japanese forces to enforce security until being replaced by GMD forces.
Here're a few points:
1. CCP won despite of, not because of, the performance of its forces in Manchuria (Northeast).
Because of the scope and angle of the book, the author put too much emphasis in Manchuria. Neither USA or the Soviet Union wanted to see civil war start again in China, so their support to either parties was relatively limited (apparently US' support of GMD was much higher). Because of logistics and other reasons (to be discussed below), Chiang never sent enough forces to Manchuria. Initially 3 corps, and more were added later. Even so, the GMD commander performed admirably, and Lin Biao's forces were pushed all the way to the north side of the Songhua River and suffered heavy losses along the way, especially at Siping.
At this point, for whatever reason (later Chiang blamed Marshall's pressure, but likely not that simple, at least logistics was a factor) and against the advice of his own high military officials, the attack was halted. This gave CCP forces in the area time to recover and Chiang missed his best opportunity there.
However, most of GMD forces were in other areas of China, especially in northern and eastern China, the same for CCP. At one point, the author mentioned that in the first months in 1947, GMD lost about 50 brigades, but failed to point out that most of the loss was not in Manchuria.
The fighting in Manchuria started early, the author never mentioned that the full scale war started in other areas in June 1946. From that point on, GMD forces took most of the cities and transportation lines from CCP (things Chiang emphasized). To CCP, annihilating enemy forces was of paramount importance.
So the CCP’s winning was NOT decided in Manchuria, it’s in central and eastern China instead. Emphasizing Manchuria is really a big mistake.
2. CCP attack in summer 1947 was a victory early, but a failure later.
The author mentioned that attack by CCP general Liu Bocheng. In my mind, that attack was successful in the early stage, but largely a failure afterwards. It had to destroy all the heavy weapons en route to Dabieshan. It was not a retreat, it’s an advance to a new area. But the force was not able to accomplish the mission of establishing a stable base there and lost about half when it left the area (down to 60K from 120 K). It couldn't recover until after the Huaihai Campaign.
3. The turning point of the war was NOT Liaoshen Campaign.
In early 1948, CCP made 2 decisions: Lin’s force moving south to attack Jingzhou (the eventual Liaoshen Campaign), but Lin would not do that by using different execuses; General Su Yu’s force cross the Yangtze River to attack GMD’s backyard. Su thought that was a bad idea and was able to persuade the top leadership to suspend the plan. Then his force was able to complete the Yudong Campaign under very difficult circumstances in June-July 1948. From that point on, GMD forces were never able to mount another large-scale attack. Mao himself believed that that’s the turning point of the war.
The condition was right to start the Liaoshen Campaign several months earlier, but strangely, there was little fighting in Manchuria. Had it happened as planned by the top CCP leadership, it would indeed have been the turning point.
4. It's not right to call CCP's method as guerrilla war.
Yes, when the situations were not right, CCP decided not to engage in a traditional war. But when necessary, they did not mind trench war. For example, during the Menglianggu Campaign (May, 1947), each side put hundreds of thousands in a small area of fighting (in central Shandong). There's an entry for it in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menglia....
5. The GMD force capturing Yan'an was NOT first rate crack units.
All agreed that GMD had 5 elite units (corps), 2 deployed in Manchuria, 2 in eastern China, and the 5th in central and eastern (depending on the time). The no. 1 of them, the 74th reorganized division (corps), was wiped out during the Menglianggu Campaign in May 1947.
An additional note: this book heavily quoted "Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950" by Odd Arne Westad, so I decided to read, but was deeply disappointed. For my review of it, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
Because I'm very familiar with the last stage of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1950), I feel I can critique this section better.
I wish that the Cold War had never happened, could it have been avoided? I don't know. In that later stage of WWII, Mao offered to visit US (possibly with Zhou) multiple times, but there were no official responses from the US. Was it because of FDR's health or diplomats or other people? We would never know what could have been.
The author correctly mentioned the military struggle between GMD (or formerly called KMT from old method of spelling) and CCP started in 1927, and the invasion by Japan in 1937 interrupted it. 1945 was a pivotal year in modern Chinese history. In October, 1945, there's a tentative agreement between the 2 parties, in which GMD agreed to share power with CCP to a limited degree, and CCP agreed to give up the areas it controlled south of the Yangtze River (several relatively small areas).
To be frank and understandably, there was very deep suspicion between them. In late 1945, CCP decided to take Manchuria as the no. 1 priority. Before that, the area was occupied by Japan for 14 years, and Japan was just defeated by the Soviet forces in August, 1945. Neither party had presence there. In their calculation, in the worst-case scenario, even if they lost everywhere else, they could always retreat to Manchuria. At this time, most of CCP's military forces were in northern and eastern China. And GMD's forces were mainly in southwestern China, very far from Manchuria. That's why Chiang ordered the Japanese forces to enforce security until being replaced by GMD forces.
Here're a few points:
1. CCP won despite of, not because of, the performance of its forces in Manchuria (Northeast).
Because of the scope and angle of the book, the author put too much emphasis in Manchuria. Neither USA or the Soviet Union wanted to see civil war start again in China, so their support to either parties was relatively limited (apparently US' support of GMD was much higher). Because of logistics and other reasons (to be discussed below), Chiang never sent enough forces to Manchuria. Initially 3 corps, and more were added later. Even so, the GMD commander performed admirably, and Lin Biao's forces were pushed all the way to the north side of the Songhua River and suffered heavy losses along the way, especially at Siping.
At this point, for whatever reason (later Chiang blamed Marshall's pressure, but likely not that simple, at least logistics was a factor) and against the advice of his own high military officials, the attack was halted. This gave CCP forces in the area time to recover and Chiang missed his best opportunity there.
However, most of GMD forces were in other areas of China, especially in northern and eastern China, the same for CCP. At one point, the author mentioned that in the first months in 1947, GMD lost about 50 brigades, but failed to point out that most of the loss was not in Manchuria.
The fighting in Manchuria started early, the author never mentioned that the full scale war started in other areas in June 1946. From that point on, GMD forces took most of the cities and transportation lines from CCP (things Chiang emphasized). To CCP, annihilating enemy forces was of paramount importance.
So the CCP’s winning was NOT decided in Manchuria, it’s in central and eastern China instead. Emphasizing Manchuria is really a big mistake.
2. CCP attack in summer 1947 was a victory early, but a failure later.
The author mentioned that attack by CCP general Liu Bocheng. In my mind, that attack was successful in the early stage, but largely a failure afterwards. It had to destroy all the heavy weapons en route to Dabieshan. It was not a retreat, it’s an advance to a new area. But the force was not able to accomplish the mission of establishing a stable base there and lost about half when it left the area (down to 60K from 120 K). It couldn't recover until after the Huaihai Campaign.
3. The turning point of the war was NOT Liaoshen Campaign.
In early 1948, CCP made 2 decisions: Lin’s force moving south to attack Jingzhou (the eventual Liaoshen Campaign), but Lin would not do that by using different execuses; General Su Yu’s force cross the Yangtze River to attack GMD’s backyard. Su thought that was a bad idea and was able to persuade the top leadership to suspend the plan. Then his force was able to complete the Yudong Campaign under very difficult circumstances in June-July 1948. From that point on, GMD forces were never able to mount another large-scale attack. Mao himself believed that that’s the turning point of the war.
The condition was right to start the Liaoshen Campaign several months earlier, but strangely, there was little fighting in Manchuria. Had it happened as planned by the top CCP leadership, it would indeed have been the turning point.
4. It's not right to call CCP's method as guerrilla war.
Yes, when the situations were not right, CCP decided not to engage in a traditional war. But when necessary, they did not mind trench war. For example, during the Menglianggu Campaign (May, 1947), each side put hundreds of thousands in a small area of fighting (in central Shandong). There's an entry for it in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menglia....
5. The GMD force capturing Yan'an was NOT first rate crack units.
All agreed that GMD had 5 elite units (corps), 2 deployed in Manchuria, 2 in eastern China, and the 5th in central and eastern (depending on the time). The no. 1 of them, the 74th reorganized division (corps), was wiped out during the Menglianggu Campaign in May 1947.
An additional note: this book heavily quoted "Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950" by Odd Arne Westad, so I decided to read, but was deeply disappointed. For my review of it, see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
December 19, 2020
"Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war!"
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.
Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.
The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.
The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.
All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.
Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.
The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.
The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.
All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.
September 10, 2019
I really enjoyed this book. Chamberlin's writing is clear and crisp. I have a new understanding of so much of the 20th Century. However, his central thesis of connecting so many wars to a global war by proxy between the USSR and the USA was weak. Particularly near the end when he discusses the wars in the Middle East. Chamberlin further confuses things by dividing his book into eras of violence: rise of communism; post-colonial wars; and ethno-religiou sectarianism.
Chamberlin begins in 1946 with the USSR attempting to subvert governments in Iran and Turkey. It is the first clear evidence I have seen of direct Soviet Russian attempts to undermine a sovereign nation. Chamberlin uses these two instances as the catalyst for the US government to determine it will fight Soviet influence everywhere. Seemingly, the Truman Doctrine was to box in the Soviet Union. The Soviets were afraid of being boxed in by the Americans. Both focused on Europe and the Middle East; and both were surprised by events in East Asia.
Chamberlin makes the case that neither global power believed that the Chinese Communists would win, so they gave little interference in the war until the communists were gaining a decisive advantage. Likewise, the Korean War also caught the global superpowers by surprise. China supporting the North Koreans was the beginning of a break between the Communist nations. Likewise the Vietnam War is easily seen as a continuation of the Truman Doctrine.
However, Chamberlin then goes on to describe the bloodbaths in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. In none of these cases could he really connect the Cold War. The annihilation of communists in Indonesia could simply be an ultra-rightwing nationalist authoritarian neutralizing his political rivals. The bloodshed affected every part of the country. There is no evidence that Russia or China even sought to help the Indonesian communists. Similarly, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was such an extreme form of Communism that one could say they were communists in name only. Vietnam invaded that country to end the insanity. China invaded Vietnam to end the invasion. Nothing about the story of the Khmer Rouge even hints at the Cold War except as a tangent in the Vietnam War. The war of Independence in Bangladesh also barely touched upon the Cold War because the Americans supported the Pakistanis. However, there was little or no evidence of Russian or Chinese meddling in that country. If anything, American support for Pakistan only pushed the Bangladeshis towards the Communists.
Lastly, Chamberlin writes a fascinating story of violence in the Middle East, beginning with the Iranian Revolution, moving into the Lebanese Civil War; and concluding with the Iraq-Iran War. All the while the war in Afghanistan was playing out. Yes, Chamberlin does an great job describing the American support for the Mujahideen. That war was clearly part of the Cold War. However, the other three conflicts had virtually no connection to the Cold War. As Chamberlin noted several times, the atheist communists were seen to be just as bad as the Americans. Both sides only wanted guns.
Noticeably left out of the book were wars in Africa and Latin America. He might have mentioned Angola and Mozambique in passing. But there may not have been enough material for him to make conclusive conclusions. Other wars, like the split in Yemen or the revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are absent. Diplomatic warfare such as trade embargoes and foreign assistance was largely kept out of the book. Even blind Soviet support for Syria and blind American support for Israel was not clear and evidenced. Chamberlin could have argued for war by proxy in Lebanon; but ultimately did not.
Overall, this was a bland history book with exceptional writing. There is distinct bias. While he lays a clear framework for the Truman Doctrine, he clearly faults Republicans, especially Nixon and Regan, with prolonging the bloodshed around the world. Truman and Johnson nominally are left alone. In fact, Chamberlin notes that Johnson was trying to end the war in Vietnam until Nixon appears to have secretly thwarted his plans by hinting the North Vietnamese could get a better peace deal if they waited for him to be elected. The war continued and expanded into Cambodia. I remain baffled at how or why Chamberlin included the wars in the Middle East unless he was trying to embarrass Republicans, especially Nixon and then Regan, Rumsfeld, and Bush. He even threw in a jab at George H.W. Bush when the Soviets sought American assistance in making peace in Afghanistan. The elder Bush brushed them aside. I cannot overemphasize how good the writing is in this book. Complex events are simplified into small bits and pieces. The writing and presentation is excellent even if the central argument is weak.
Chamberlin begins in 1946 with the USSR attempting to subvert governments in Iran and Turkey. It is the first clear evidence I have seen of direct Soviet Russian attempts to undermine a sovereign nation. Chamberlin uses these two instances as the catalyst for the US government to determine it will fight Soviet influence everywhere. Seemingly, the Truman Doctrine was to box in the Soviet Union. The Soviets were afraid of being boxed in by the Americans. Both focused on Europe and the Middle East; and both were surprised by events in East Asia.
Chamberlin makes the case that neither global power believed that the Chinese Communists would win, so they gave little interference in the war until the communists were gaining a decisive advantage. Likewise, the Korean War also caught the global superpowers by surprise. China supporting the North Koreans was the beginning of a break between the Communist nations. Likewise the Vietnam War is easily seen as a continuation of the Truman Doctrine.
However, Chamberlin then goes on to describe the bloodbaths in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. In none of these cases could he really connect the Cold War. The annihilation of communists in Indonesia could simply be an ultra-rightwing nationalist authoritarian neutralizing his political rivals. The bloodshed affected every part of the country. There is no evidence that Russia or China even sought to help the Indonesian communists. Similarly, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was such an extreme form of Communism that one could say they were communists in name only. Vietnam invaded that country to end the insanity. China invaded Vietnam to end the invasion. Nothing about the story of the Khmer Rouge even hints at the Cold War except as a tangent in the Vietnam War. The war of Independence in Bangladesh also barely touched upon the Cold War because the Americans supported the Pakistanis. However, there was little or no evidence of Russian or Chinese meddling in that country. If anything, American support for Pakistan only pushed the Bangladeshis towards the Communists.
Lastly, Chamberlin writes a fascinating story of violence in the Middle East, beginning with the Iranian Revolution, moving into the Lebanese Civil War; and concluding with the Iraq-Iran War. All the while the war in Afghanistan was playing out. Yes, Chamberlin does an great job describing the American support for the Mujahideen. That war was clearly part of the Cold War. However, the other three conflicts had virtually no connection to the Cold War. As Chamberlin noted several times, the atheist communists were seen to be just as bad as the Americans. Both sides only wanted guns.
Noticeably left out of the book were wars in Africa and Latin America. He might have mentioned Angola and Mozambique in passing. But there may not have been enough material for him to make conclusive conclusions. Other wars, like the split in Yemen or the revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are absent. Diplomatic warfare such as trade embargoes and foreign assistance was largely kept out of the book. Even blind Soviet support for Syria and blind American support for Israel was not clear and evidenced. Chamberlin could have argued for war by proxy in Lebanon; but ultimately did not.
Overall, this was a bland history book with exceptional writing. There is distinct bias. While he lays a clear framework for the Truman Doctrine, he clearly faults Republicans, especially Nixon and Regan, with prolonging the bloodshed around the world. Truman and Johnson nominally are left alone. In fact, Chamberlin notes that Johnson was trying to end the war in Vietnam until Nixon appears to have secretly thwarted his plans by hinting the North Vietnamese could get a better peace deal if they waited for him to be elected. The war continued and expanded into Cambodia. I remain baffled at how or why Chamberlin included the wars in the Middle East unless he was trying to embarrass Republicans, especially Nixon and then Regan, Rumsfeld, and Bush. He even threw in a jab at George H.W. Bush when the Soviets sought American assistance in making peace in Afghanistan. The elder Bush brushed them aside. I cannot overemphasize how good the writing is in this book. Complex events are simplified into small bits and pieces. The writing and presentation is excellent even if the central argument is weak.
October 5, 2018
This book is a very good, if somewhat incomplete, broad, popular overview of the Cold War. Focusing on the 'world island', specifically east Asia and the Middle East, Chamberlain does a good job supporting his thesis that the superpower struggle between Moscow's Marxist global revolution and Washingtons liberal Capitalist technocracy actually wrecked much of the world. The superpower struggle spurred armed conflict between rising powers and former colonial possessions, and helped not to unify the world under a single ideological banner, but actually caused disunity and chaos.
Beginning with the second phase of the Chinese Civil War in 1947, and ending with a very brief discussion on the opening of the ridiculously termed 'Global War on Terror', the author showcases the complexity of the erosion of order in the world island and the coming of chaotic upheaval and warfare.
As the author points out, both ideological systems were incapable of uniting the world: Marxism was too devastating to its own adherents, and the inability of Marxist states to stay united (the Sino-Soviet split, Vietnam standing alone against China) destroyed the possibility of Marxist revolutionary unity. Concurrently the American brand of globalist technocracy, of a soft imperialism defined by liberal social politics and crony capitalism, was far too akin to European colonialism to be palatable to the vast majority of the world. And the damage the American/Globalist system does to cultures and their heritage makes it an utterly impossible system to work on a long term basis. Hence the third way of most of the world, where religious and nationalist/ethnic supremacy eschewed both the Moscow and Washington models became the norm in the late Cold War and which are, even now, eating away at the fragile pillars of support of the Washington/European model of technocratic rule as nationalism and cultural traditionalists and nationalists are destroying the technocratic vision in the fracturing EU and the United States.
As I said, however, this book is incomplete.
No mention is made of the various Arab-Israeli Wars even though all of them, particularly the 1967 and 1973 wars, are responsible for the turning away of most of the Arab states from socialism towards Islamic revivalism. (The author also missed that the modern wave of Islamic revivalism stems not from the Cold War but from the 18th century with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the long festering Arab dissatisfaction with the Ottoman Caliphate and the brutality of the Turks towards the Arabs).
The author selectively ignores the first two Indo-Pakistani Wars, as well as the broader range of conflicts in the outer world which had links to the warfare in the world island such as the bloodbaths in Africa, central America and the Philippines. (The Philippines conflicts with the Moros does get a mention but a brief one).
Despite all of that, this is a good book, especially for those who are new to the subject matter. Several of the massed conflicts that get typically ignored in American historical literature have at least decent coverage in a broad overview. While the common stories of the Korean and Vietnam Wars are covered, the author illumines several that are unknowns.
The Chinese Civil War receives its proper place in the historical pantheon as a seminal event in the creation of the modern world. The 1971 Indo-Pakistani War is highlighted in some detail, as are both the Iran-Iraq Wars (possibly the best chapters in the book), and the Soviet War in Afghanistan. (Where, like the US in Vietnam, the Russians were all but tactically invincible, but whose victories were entirely meaningless).
And the book does a good showcasing how much of the world was, and is now, driven by smaller players who occasionally play in the orbits of Moscow-Beijing-Washington such as Israel, Egypt, Syria, Vietnam, Pakistan, India and Iran.
Overall a very good book, one I can heartily recommend even if I found it a tad incomplete.
Beginning with the second phase of the Chinese Civil War in 1947, and ending with a very brief discussion on the opening of the ridiculously termed 'Global War on Terror', the author showcases the complexity of the erosion of order in the world island and the coming of chaotic upheaval and warfare.
As the author points out, both ideological systems were incapable of uniting the world: Marxism was too devastating to its own adherents, and the inability of Marxist states to stay united (the Sino-Soviet split, Vietnam standing alone against China) destroyed the possibility of Marxist revolutionary unity. Concurrently the American brand of globalist technocracy, of a soft imperialism defined by liberal social politics and crony capitalism, was far too akin to European colonialism to be palatable to the vast majority of the world. And the damage the American/Globalist system does to cultures and their heritage makes it an utterly impossible system to work on a long term basis. Hence the third way of most of the world, where religious and nationalist/ethnic supremacy eschewed both the Moscow and Washington models became the norm in the late Cold War and which are, even now, eating away at the fragile pillars of support of the Washington/European model of technocratic rule as nationalism and cultural traditionalists and nationalists are destroying the technocratic vision in the fracturing EU and the United States.
As I said, however, this book is incomplete.
No mention is made of the various Arab-Israeli Wars even though all of them, particularly the 1967 and 1973 wars, are responsible for the turning away of most of the Arab states from socialism towards Islamic revivalism. (The author also missed that the modern wave of Islamic revivalism stems not from the Cold War but from the 18th century with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the long festering Arab dissatisfaction with the Ottoman Caliphate and the brutality of the Turks towards the Arabs).
The author selectively ignores the first two Indo-Pakistani Wars, as well as the broader range of conflicts in the outer world which had links to the warfare in the world island such as the bloodbaths in Africa, central America and the Philippines. (The Philippines conflicts with the Moros does get a mention but a brief one).
Despite all of that, this is a good book, especially for those who are new to the subject matter. Several of the massed conflicts that get typically ignored in American historical literature have at least decent coverage in a broad overview. While the common stories of the Korean and Vietnam Wars are covered, the author illumines several that are unknowns.
The Chinese Civil War receives its proper place in the historical pantheon as a seminal event in the creation of the modern world. The 1971 Indo-Pakistani War is highlighted in some detail, as are both the Iran-Iraq Wars (possibly the best chapters in the book), and the Soviet War in Afghanistan. (Where, like the US in Vietnam, the Russians were all but tactically invincible, but whose victories were entirely meaningless).
And the book does a good showcasing how much of the world was, and is now, driven by smaller players who occasionally play in the orbits of Moscow-Beijing-Washington such as Israel, Egypt, Syria, Vietnam, Pakistan, India and Iran.
Overall a very good book, one I can heartily recommend even if I found it a tad incomplete.
October 20, 2023
wszystko chuj, a kissinger najbardziej
January 20, 2019
This was a very interesting read for me especially when the history got to the 1980s. I am of the age where I was too young to really understand the political climate of the 80s in anything approaching rich detail and, yet, that decade wasn't really covered in my history class as it wasn't yet "history." And then I have spent most of my academic career firmly in the 19th century. So while I knew bits and pieces --- the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet/U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Libyan war --- I didn't know how they might be connected. This gave me new understanding.
And yet, as I know all history has a perspective, I don't want to suggest that this book gives the whole picture. It stands in contrast to Francis Fukuyama who argues for the end of history (I'm not a fan of Fukuyama). And it looks at the Cold War from the perspective of those who were most harmed by it rather than the superpowers (which I feel is a really important corrective as what little Cold War history I did get was from the perspective of the US/Russia/China). And, perhaps most importantly to me personally, it gives me a clear point of reference to do other reading.
And yet, as I know all history has a perspective, I don't want to suggest that this book gives the whole picture. It stands in contrast to Francis Fukuyama who argues for the end of history (I'm not a fan of Fukuyama). And it looks at the Cold War from the perspective of those who were most harmed by it rather than the superpowers (which I feel is a really important corrective as what little Cold War history I did get was from the perspective of the US/Russia/China). And, perhaps most importantly to me personally, it gives me a clear point of reference to do other reading.
January 21, 2019
The thesis is great: that an entire set of wars across Asia was inextricably linked to the Cold War. Tehy were not simply proxy wars; the combatants had their own reasons for fighting them. But the US and USSR (and then China) used them that way.
The problem is that this is a ton of ground, and so what the book amounts to is potted histories of a lot of conflicts. It's good as that goes, but if you're already got a basic grasp of the history, this is going to fill in gaps more than give you a deep analysis of the wars and their linkages. He could have done more with the topic.
The problem is that this is a ton of ground, and so what the book amounts to is potted histories of a lot of conflicts. It's good as that goes, but if you're already got a basic grasp of the history, this is going to fill in gaps more than give you a deep analysis of the wars and their linkages. He could have done more with the topic.
March 14, 2019
If you're looking for a fine general overview of the various wars that occurred during the Cold War, this is the book for you. It's informative and well-written and you'll learn quite a bit.
September 6, 2021
The “new global history” makes its way from the archive-heavy “groundbreaking” texts that get a scholar through the door, to the more approachable, secondary-source-using works that help a professor get tenure (and if they’re lucky and have a good contract, textbook buys). Chamberlin did the former with his book “The Global Offensive,” about the PLO’s international campaigns, and is now doing this latter with a broad-scope look at the Cold War in Asia. It makes sense the Cold War is such a locus for global history, given that it took place around the world, and the archives are mostly intact, and in a variety of languages for all these scholars to show off their chops. It’s been a good time for Cold War scholars.
Chamberlin takes aim, though in a curiously unaggressive way, at two shibboleths of recent twentieth-century historiography. One is right there in the subtitle: “the long peace,” the idea that the Cold War constituted a peculiar time where conventional wars between great powers ceased, in marked contrast to the first half of the century. This was most strongly promulgated by the dean of Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, though Gaddis, in this as in other instances, was always more of an affirmer of consensus establishment ideas than he was an innovator. It’s easy to see the Cold War as peaceful from Yale. It’s a lot harder from pretty much anywhere in the parts of the world that Chamberlin writes about and refers to as “bloodlands,” making another nod at another Yale historian with substantial crossover appeal, Tim Snyder (Chamberlin went from a job at the University of Kentucky to one at Columbia over the course of researching this book, for those playing the home game). Snyder’s “Bloodlands” was an interesting and frustrating book, understanding the regions between a Germany and Russia through a lens inflected both by an understanding of the central importance of mass violence and a certain liberal totalitarianism-school dingbattery that only got worse once Snyder got Resistance-brain after the Trump election.
Chamberlin reassures us he’s not having a go at Gaddis and I don’t recall him mentioning Snyder by name but there’s enough of interest here to retain us without academic backbiting. The central idea should be obvious to anybody: maybe we avoided the big nuclear blowout everyone was afraid of, but a lot of countries suffered terribly due to the Cold War. Particularly given the coincidence of the Cold War occurring during the collapse of the European empires, the conflicts that would have accompanied decolonization in any event became supercharged and freighted with meaning as the Cold War superpowers forced each conflict into the framework of bilateral — or at best, US vs USSR vs China trilateral — conflict. The Cold War’s gravitational pull — and especially the sheer determination on the part of the American side to assimilate seemingly every political event between 1947 and maybe 1980, if not well after, into an us vs them framework, and the money and force they’d throw into the project — drew in wars that had little to do with decolonization as well, particularly in the Middle East.
While some of this dynamic played out in Africa and Latin America, Chamberlin chooses to focus his efforts on Asia. This makes sense, as many of the worst conflicts occurred there, and enough of them happened that you get a solid arc of conflicts from the end of WWII right up to the nineties. Most of the book is made up of respectable capsule histories of Cold War conflicts running in an arc from Korea all the way to Lebanon. Chamberlin artfully balances concision and completeness, overarching theses and the details of the individual conflicts. It wouldn’t make a half-bad textbook with which to teach the Cold War.
The historical narratives Chamberlin threads through these conflicts include atrocious conduct towards civilians as well as the eventual downfall of both revolutionary Third World communism and of secular nationalism in much of the arc of conflict he describes. Most of the wars in Cold War Asia were civil wars, and one thing that has become increasingly clear in history is that civil wars are a special kind of hell (you have to wonder how much the fact that the US Civil War was understood as “chivalrous,” alongside the way the English kind of throw their civil war down the memory hole, contributed to the delay of that realization in anglophone history). These invariably become wars against suspect populations. In Korea, massacring suspect civilians was de rigueur when either side, the American-backed South or the communist North, seized an area, or retreated from it. Massacre was also common on the invariable “both sides” in Vietnam, to the point where many were surprised that after the communist revolutionaries final victory, their revenge kill count was “only” in the five or six figures. On and on.
“Both sides” doesn’t really cover it, though, because one side was typically a good deal stronger than the other, and that was the side that was backed by the United States. The Soviets and Chinese did not distinguish themselves with their regard for human life during interventions in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam. But it’s clear, from this book and from the Cold War scholarship in general, that both material and ideological factors rendered American-backed parties in these wars both deadlier and more willing to use that deadliness indiscriminately. You want to see disregard for human life, have a gander at the conversations between Nixon and Kissinger about what their friend, the Pakistani military under Yahya Khan, was doing in Bangladesh in 1971, or the approving CIA memos of the mob slayings of hundreds of thousands of purported communists in Indonesia in 1965. You didn’t need to be a sociopath like Kissinger, though- just accepting of the Cold War establishment party line and not thinking too much, like most Americans involved in destroying Korea and Vietnam, in large part from tens of thousands of feet in the air or from an office somewhere, killing between one and three million in both places, mostly civilians. Even the (arguably) grisliest set of episodes in the book, the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, took place with tacit American (and Chinese) approval, to “counter” in some backwards way, the (Russian-backed) North Vietnamese.
The international left won some pretty substantial victories in Asia during this period, mainly in creating and maintaining a communist regime in China and the victory over American imperialism in Vietnam. But it took a beating in doing so. Brutalized societies do not for utopias make. In many respects, our caricatures of Communist regimes as brutal and deprived gain their truth from the fact that all of them — not just the ones in the Asian bloodlands, either — went from long-oppressed, typically impoverished autocracies to war-torn messes to just left to their own devices. There’s limits to how much failure and oppression that excuses, but the point is that deprivation and violence, often enough inflicted by overweening foreigners (who think they’re doing you a favor in the bargain!), tend to elevate harsh, hasty decisions and those who are comfortable implementing them. The rest is history.
It’s questionable how much that factored in to the ways in which the third wave of Asian Cold War conflicts in the Middle East (after a first wave in Northeast Asia and a second in Southeast Asia) turned away from communism and towards ethnic conflict and religion, especially militant Islamism. It certainly didn’t help, in terms of confusing local socialist forces (do we favor China or Russia, etc?) or inculcating paranoia and divisiveness in, say, the Afghan left. Egypt and Arab nationalism is somewhat outside of the scope, or anyway the framing Chamberlin gave it, and while he doesn’t underplay the American hand in encouraging Islamist forces, he doesn’t quite nail how destroyed the Middle East left was by direct suppression, not just discouragement at how communism seemed hard and treacherous.
This brings me to one of the odder things about the book- what he counts and what he doesn’t as part of his “bloodlands.” Snyder was odd about this too, including relatively quiet Estonia but not bloodied Yugoslavia, but he had a thesis, double-occupation, Nazi-Soviet totalitarian interplay, to advance. I don’t really see what Chamberlin’s thesis would lose by including the Hukbalahap rebellion in the Philippines in the late forties and early fifties, or the “Malay Emergency” that ran from 1948 to 1962. I guess every pedant will find a gored ox in any book of this kind, and the book doesn’t suffer too much from their exclusion. It probably doesn’t help that neither war is that well sourced or widely written about, as I have reason to know. In fact, the main people who write about them are self-dealing counterinsurgents crowing about them as success for their model of war. Beyond them it’s tricky to find stuff. The British aren’t eager to talk about Malaya because of their usual impulse to hide their dirt; Americans aren’t eager to talk about the Philippines because it’s a confusing by-blow that doesn’t demand anything of them (not unlike Liberia in that respect). For instance, I can’t find a good casualty count for the Huk War. Details are a little better with the Emergency but not much. It could be they simply weren’t bloody enough for Chamberlin’s definitions? But among other things, they encouraged the western side in the Cold War to take a hard line in Asia…
Anyway, this is a pretty admirable work of history. It’s interesting to see the “bloodland” thing taken out of the context of totalitarianism arguments, most of which implicitly back Anglo-American power, if not all of its uses (often, totalitarianism-minders want that power to be used more aggressively, like North Korea hawks). It’s conceivable that this book is an instance in a kind of positional warfare on the part of soft-left (here meaning actual leftists who are cautious about revolution, not liberals) academics to use widely accepted notions — like that it’s bad to kill millions of people — to criticize the Cold War state and its inheritors, most of the states currently extant and the neoliberal capitalism that dominates most of them. That’s cool- I can’t help but imagine the slashing attack an Eric Hobsbawm or a Walter Rodney would make of the same material, but sometimes expanding the trench lines works too. ****’
Chamberlin takes aim, though in a curiously unaggressive way, at two shibboleths of recent twentieth-century historiography. One is right there in the subtitle: “the long peace,” the idea that the Cold War constituted a peculiar time where conventional wars between great powers ceased, in marked contrast to the first half of the century. This was most strongly promulgated by the dean of Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, though Gaddis, in this as in other instances, was always more of an affirmer of consensus establishment ideas than he was an innovator. It’s easy to see the Cold War as peaceful from Yale. It’s a lot harder from pretty much anywhere in the parts of the world that Chamberlin writes about and refers to as “bloodlands,” making another nod at another Yale historian with substantial crossover appeal, Tim Snyder (Chamberlin went from a job at the University of Kentucky to one at Columbia over the course of researching this book, for those playing the home game). Snyder’s “Bloodlands” was an interesting and frustrating book, understanding the regions between a Germany and Russia through a lens inflected both by an understanding of the central importance of mass violence and a certain liberal totalitarianism-school dingbattery that only got worse once Snyder got Resistance-brain after the Trump election.
Chamberlin reassures us he’s not having a go at Gaddis and I don’t recall him mentioning Snyder by name but there’s enough of interest here to retain us without academic backbiting. The central idea should be obvious to anybody: maybe we avoided the big nuclear blowout everyone was afraid of, but a lot of countries suffered terribly due to the Cold War. Particularly given the coincidence of the Cold War occurring during the collapse of the European empires, the conflicts that would have accompanied decolonization in any event became supercharged and freighted with meaning as the Cold War superpowers forced each conflict into the framework of bilateral — or at best, US vs USSR vs China trilateral — conflict. The Cold War’s gravitational pull — and especially the sheer determination on the part of the American side to assimilate seemingly every political event between 1947 and maybe 1980, if not well after, into an us vs them framework, and the money and force they’d throw into the project — drew in wars that had little to do with decolonization as well, particularly in the Middle East.
While some of this dynamic played out in Africa and Latin America, Chamberlin chooses to focus his efforts on Asia. This makes sense, as many of the worst conflicts occurred there, and enough of them happened that you get a solid arc of conflicts from the end of WWII right up to the nineties. Most of the book is made up of respectable capsule histories of Cold War conflicts running in an arc from Korea all the way to Lebanon. Chamberlin artfully balances concision and completeness, overarching theses and the details of the individual conflicts. It wouldn’t make a half-bad textbook with which to teach the Cold War.
The historical narratives Chamberlin threads through these conflicts include atrocious conduct towards civilians as well as the eventual downfall of both revolutionary Third World communism and of secular nationalism in much of the arc of conflict he describes. Most of the wars in Cold War Asia were civil wars, and one thing that has become increasingly clear in history is that civil wars are a special kind of hell (you have to wonder how much the fact that the US Civil War was understood as “chivalrous,” alongside the way the English kind of throw their civil war down the memory hole, contributed to the delay of that realization in anglophone history). These invariably become wars against suspect populations. In Korea, massacring suspect civilians was de rigueur when either side, the American-backed South or the communist North, seized an area, or retreated from it. Massacre was also common on the invariable “both sides” in Vietnam, to the point where many were surprised that after the communist revolutionaries final victory, their revenge kill count was “only” in the five or six figures. On and on.
“Both sides” doesn’t really cover it, though, because one side was typically a good deal stronger than the other, and that was the side that was backed by the United States. The Soviets and Chinese did not distinguish themselves with their regard for human life during interventions in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam. But it’s clear, from this book and from the Cold War scholarship in general, that both material and ideological factors rendered American-backed parties in these wars both deadlier and more willing to use that deadliness indiscriminately. You want to see disregard for human life, have a gander at the conversations between Nixon and Kissinger about what their friend, the Pakistani military under Yahya Khan, was doing in Bangladesh in 1971, or the approving CIA memos of the mob slayings of hundreds of thousands of purported communists in Indonesia in 1965. You didn’t need to be a sociopath like Kissinger, though- just accepting of the Cold War establishment party line and not thinking too much, like most Americans involved in destroying Korea and Vietnam, in large part from tens of thousands of feet in the air or from an office somewhere, killing between one and three million in both places, mostly civilians. Even the (arguably) grisliest set of episodes in the book, the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, took place with tacit American (and Chinese) approval, to “counter” in some backwards way, the (Russian-backed) North Vietnamese.
The international left won some pretty substantial victories in Asia during this period, mainly in creating and maintaining a communist regime in China and the victory over American imperialism in Vietnam. But it took a beating in doing so. Brutalized societies do not for utopias make. In many respects, our caricatures of Communist regimes as brutal and deprived gain their truth from the fact that all of them — not just the ones in the Asian bloodlands, either — went from long-oppressed, typically impoverished autocracies to war-torn messes to just left to their own devices. There’s limits to how much failure and oppression that excuses, but the point is that deprivation and violence, often enough inflicted by overweening foreigners (who think they’re doing you a favor in the bargain!), tend to elevate harsh, hasty decisions and those who are comfortable implementing them. The rest is history.
It’s questionable how much that factored in to the ways in which the third wave of Asian Cold War conflicts in the Middle East (after a first wave in Northeast Asia and a second in Southeast Asia) turned away from communism and towards ethnic conflict and religion, especially militant Islamism. It certainly didn’t help, in terms of confusing local socialist forces (do we favor China or Russia, etc?) or inculcating paranoia and divisiveness in, say, the Afghan left. Egypt and Arab nationalism is somewhat outside of the scope, or anyway the framing Chamberlin gave it, and while he doesn’t underplay the American hand in encouraging Islamist forces, he doesn’t quite nail how destroyed the Middle East left was by direct suppression, not just discouragement at how communism seemed hard and treacherous.
This brings me to one of the odder things about the book- what he counts and what he doesn’t as part of his “bloodlands.” Snyder was odd about this too, including relatively quiet Estonia but not bloodied Yugoslavia, but he had a thesis, double-occupation, Nazi-Soviet totalitarian interplay, to advance. I don’t really see what Chamberlin’s thesis would lose by including the Hukbalahap rebellion in the Philippines in the late forties and early fifties, or the “Malay Emergency” that ran from 1948 to 1962. I guess every pedant will find a gored ox in any book of this kind, and the book doesn’t suffer too much from their exclusion. It probably doesn’t help that neither war is that well sourced or widely written about, as I have reason to know. In fact, the main people who write about them are self-dealing counterinsurgents crowing about them as success for their model of war. Beyond them it’s tricky to find stuff. The British aren’t eager to talk about Malaya because of their usual impulse to hide their dirt; Americans aren’t eager to talk about the Philippines because it’s a confusing by-blow that doesn’t demand anything of them (not unlike Liberia in that respect). For instance, I can’t find a good casualty count for the Huk War. Details are a little better with the Emergency but not much. It could be they simply weren’t bloody enough for Chamberlin’s definitions? But among other things, they encouraged the western side in the Cold War to take a hard line in Asia…
Anyway, this is a pretty admirable work of history. It’s interesting to see the “bloodland” thing taken out of the context of totalitarianism arguments, most of which implicitly back Anglo-American power, if not all of its uses (often, totalitarianism-minders want that power to be used more aggressively, like North Korea hawks). It’s conceivable that this book is an instance in a kind of positional warfare on the part of soft-left (here meaning actual leftists who are cautious about revolution, not liberals) academics to use widely accepted notions — like that it’s bad to kill millions of people — to criticize the Cold War state and its inheritors, most of the states currently extant and the neoliberal capitalism that dominates most of them. That’s cool- I can’t help but imagine the slashing attack an Eric Hobsbawm or a Walter Rodney would make of the same material, but sometimes expanding the trench lines works too. ****’
August 8, 2021
A thorough and challenging revision of much of Cold War history and part of the global turn in CW history. PTC argues that Gaddis idea of the CW as a "long peace" overlooks how CW interventions intensified warfare and political radicalism along a long frontier ranging from North Africa through the Middle East, Central Asia, and into East and southeast Asia. Both superpowers saw this a testing ground for their ideologies, feared they were being encircled by the other, and intervened extensively in these areas, prioritizing allies who crushed the other side much more than ideological consistency. Along with endogenous factors, this sort of offshored and intensified the violence of the Cold War.
Chamberlin divides the violence of the Cold War into 3 stages. In the Asian Offensive, from the 1940s to the 1960, Communists made huge gains, mostly in Asia. In the 2nd stage, the Asian counteroffensive, Western-backed forces in Indonesia, East Pakistan, and elsewhere crushed communist or left leaning movements, and the Sino-Soviet split and internecine communist conflict delegitimized the Communist brand in the 3rd World and put communism in general on a long term path of decline. In the 3rd stage, the Great Sectarian Revolt, global politics started to shift to more sectarian/religious/ethnic axes rather than East-West binary of the CW, exemplified by conflicts in the Middle East and the rise of religious fundamentalism. The US often tried to harness the momentum of this revolt, with some successes, against the Soviets, but there were obvious long-term consequences to this stoking of radicalism. If there is a policy lesson in this book, it's that the US intervened so drastically, or supported the crushing of, relatively moderate and sometimes left-leaning nationalist movements that it ended up discrediting those movements and fueling extremism that we are still dealing with today.
One of the big takeaways from this book for me was the importance of China to the Cold War. PTC almost argues that this was a three-way conflict, and he shows how the Chinese intervened throughout the world almost as much as the Soviets did. China was central to the growth of a 3rd world communist-nationalist model that was huge in the 50s and 60s, stealing much of the revolutionary thunder of the increasingly conservative Soviets. PTC's account of the CHinese Revolution and the rise of the Sino-Soviet split are excellent, especially in how he weaves in the story of 3rd world intervention.
One mild critique I have of this book is that I'm not sure how useful the borderlands framework is. Tim Snyder uses the borderlands concept very well in his book bloodlands, but there's he talking about a more discrete, limited body of territory btw the USSR and Nazi Germany. I'm not sure how useful it is to think of the "rimland" btw the Soviet Union and the Indian and Pacific oceans as a borderland in any meaningful sense. I mean, well over half the world's population lives in that belt, so it would be natural that Cold War feuds would erupt there. It just doesn't seem to add anything to the analysis. Another mild critique is that I think PTC overstates the importance of the CW to the Great Sectarian Revolt of the 70s and 80s. Obviously outside interventions stoked tensions here (although PTC overlooks cases of controlling tensions like the US negotiation of peace btw ISrael and Egypt), but I think the causes were largely endogenous, as shown by the fact that the ME has remained a hotspot of global conflict since the end of the CW as other areas have become more peaceful.
This book joins a wide body of work on the global Cold War, and while I'm not totally on board with the argument (or how new it is relative to Odd Arne Westad's work), it is a strong and thorough work of synthesis that advances its own bold interpretation while also providing comprehensive coverage of the Cold War in the Third World. I'm sure I will draw on it for research and teaching. Recommended less for the lay reader of history (it's quite long) than for students, researchers, and teachers of U.S. and global history in the 20th century.
Chamberlin divides the violence of the Cold War into 3 stages. In the Asian Offensive, from the 1940s to the 1960, Communists made huge gains, mostly in Asia. In the 2nd stage, the Asian counteroffensive, Western-backed forces in Indonesia, East Pakistan, and elsewhere crushed communist or left leaning movements, and the Sino-Soviet split and internecine communist conflict delegitimized the Communist brand in the 3rd World and put communism in general on a long term path of decline. In the 3rd stage, the Great Sectarian Revolt, global politics started to shift to more sectarian/religious/ethnic axes rather than East-West binary of the CW, exemplified by conflicts in the Middle East and the rise of religious fundamentalism. The US often tried to harness the momentum of this revolt, with some successes, against the Soviets, but there were obvious long-term consequences to this stoking of radicalism. If there is a policy lesson in this book, it's that the US intervened so drastically, or supported the crushing of, relatively moderate and sometimes left-leaning nationalist movements that it ended up discrediting those movements and fueling extremism that we are still dealing with today.
One of the big takeaways from this book for me was the importance of China to the Cold War. PTC almost argues that this was a three-way conflict, and he shows how the Chinese intervened throughout the world almost as much as the Soviets did. China was central to the growth of a 3rd world communist-nationalist model that was huge in the 50s and 60s, stealing much of the revolutionary thunder of the increasingly conservative Soviets. PTC's account of the CHinese Revolution and the rise of the Sino-Soviet split are excellent, especially in how he weaves in the story of 3rd world intervention.
One mild critique I have of this book is that I'm not sure how useful the borderlands framework is. Tim Snyder uses the borderlands concept very well in his book bloodlands, but there's he talking about a more discrete, limited body of territory btw the USSR and Nazi Germany. I'm not sure how useful it is to think of the "rimland" btw the Soviet Union and the Indian and Pacific oceans as a borderland in any meaningful sense. I mean, well over half the world's population lives in that belt, so it would be natural that Cold War feuds would erupt there. It just doesn't seem to add anything to the analysis. Another mild critique is that I think PTC overstates the importance of the CW to the Great Sectarian Revolt of the 70s and 80s. Obviously outside interventions stoked tensions here (although PTC overlooks cases of controlling tensions like the US negotiation of peace btw ISrael and Egypt), but I think the causes were largely endogenous, as shown by the fact that the ME has remained a hotspot of global conflict since the end of the CW as other areas have become more peaceful.
This book joins a wide body of work on the global Cold War, and while I'm not totally on board with the argument (or how new it is relative to Odd Arne Westad's work), it is a strong and thorough work of synthesis that advances its own bold interpretation while also providing comprehensive coverage of the Cold War in the Third World. I'm sure I will draw on it for research and teaching. Recommended less for the lay reader of history (it's quite long) than for students, researchers, and teachers of U.S. and global history in the 20th century.
Want to read
July 20, 20232018
May 11, 2025
Solid enough overview of some wars both well-known and neglected. Unsatisfying as a deep excursion, though: a reminder that accessible academic history often isn’t all that different from responsible journalism. Many potentially interesting avenues forsook in favor of Wikipedia-type summarization. No major light shed on internal American or Soviet politics, for example.
June 6, 2024
The content was dry but the focus was amazing. I have always bought into the idea that the Cold War was relatively peaceful - two superpowers in a standoff. But that’s because it was peaceful for US. Looking at the same time period for other parts of the world, it was a very hot war with millions upon millions killed directly and indirectly by the U.S./Russia.
February 20, 2024
The author's thesis - namely, that the Cold War was only cold for inhabitants of the Great Powers, and that for people living in Asia it was a very brutal time - is interesting and usefully frames otherwise isolated events like the Chinese Civil War and the Vietnam War. However, rather than analyze the ramifications of this contextualization, the author gets bogged down in elementary and, frankly, dull recitals of these events. Maybe this book would be better if you skipped around and only read the chapters with analysis in them? I know that's how they read stuff in grad school (and this author is a professor), but it's not how I prefer to read. This book would have been better as an article (but then would it have been as impressive on the author's resume?).
September 1, 2018
A very good book, covering the somewhat forgotten Cold War conflicts of Asia, from the Chinese civil war to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It focuses more of the political and and strategic issues rather than the on the ground conflict, although it does not shirk this side of things. My only regret is that I did not read "The Cold War: A World History" by Odd Arne Westad, before rather than after as it is providing some great background material to the matters covered in this book.
December 7, 2018
Excellent! This book provides an ambitious survey of the Cold War in all its manifestations, many of which didn’t garner the degree of American public attention they deserved. This book covers so much ground that it’s inevitable that some readers may wish for more depth and detail on certain topics but I think it was extremely well conceptualized and produced.
April 6, 2019
The value in this book is the emphasis (even if in survey form) it places on the many diverse and bloody battlefields of the broader Cold War. The thesis is simple--the Cold War was not cold, esp in Asia. While not bold, I think the emphasis on toll rather than geopoliticals makes this a good addition to cold War literature.
September 21, 2024
This is a very good military history of the Cold War, focusing on the bloody conflicts that ravaged Asia and the Middle East from 1945 to 1991. Chamberlin's main argument is that the traditional characterization of the Cold War as a time of tense but ultimately peaceful relations between the US and Soviet Union ignores the experience of the majority of the world's population, in which great power interference in the civil wars and ethnic conflicts that rippled through Asia and the Middle East at this time worsened the death and destruction endured by civilian populations.
While, again, the historical research here is great and the book is put together in a way that is clear and comprehensive, I’m not sure the argument being made here is as novel as the author implies. Sample size of one obviously, but even my high school education about the cold war focused on great power proxy conflicts, and it’d be hard to argue that people forget about the Korean and Vietnam wars. And while I think it’s undeniable the US and Soviet Union’s interference in the various conflicts chronicled in this book did affect their courses and outcomes, often in ways that expanded the death tolls and prolonged the misery suffered by civilians, I’m less convinced by the implications that some of these conflicts would have been avoided without great-power interference. A lot of the episodes of violence captured in this book were the result of things set in motion long before the US or the Soviets arrived on the scene, and while it makes sense to lay some blame at the feet of the great powers for making matters worse, it seems oddly aggrandizing of those two nations and minimizing of others to behave as if areas of the world with long-standing political, ethnic, and religious tensions would have remained peaceful if they’d just been left alone.
What the book does do really well is make clear the connections between the military conflicts on the ground and the broader ideological conflicts at play in each of the three distinct phases of the Cold War Chamberlin identifies (Imperialism/Nationalism, Eastern Communism/Western Capitalism, and various ethnic and sectarian conflicts), and how the ideological conflicts of each era led into the next. There’s a lot of ground covered here for just one volume, but I think it’s useful to take a view this broad sometimes to see how all the moving pieces fit together, and overall I think Chamberlin does that very well.
While, again, the historical research here is great and the book is put together in a way that is clear and comprehensive, I’m not sure the argument being made here is as novel as the author implies. Sample size of one obviously, but even my high school education about the cold war focused on great power proxy conflicts, and it’d be hard to argue that people forget about the Korean and Vietnam wars. And while I think it’s undeniable the US and Soviet Union’s interference in the various conflicts chronicled in this book did affect their courses and outcomes, often in ways that expanded the death tolls and prolonged the misery suffered by civilians, I’m less convinced by the implications that some of these conflicts would have been avoided without great-power interference. A lot of the episodes of violence captured in this book were the result of things set in motion long before the US or the Soviets arrived on the scene, and while it makes sense to lay some blame at the feet of the great powers for making matters worse, it seems oddly aggrandizing of those two nations and minimizing of others to behave as if areas of the world with long-standing political, ethnic, and religious tensions would have remained peaceful if they’d just been left alone.
What the book does do really well is make clear the connections between the military conflicts on the ground and the broader ideological conflicts at play in each of the three distinct phases of the Cold War Chamberlin identifies (Imperialism/Nationalism, Eastern Communism/Western Capitalism, and various ethnic and sectarian conflicts), and how the ideological conflicts of each era led into the next. There’s a lot of ground covered here for just one volume, but I think it’s useful to take a view this broad sometimes to see how all the moving pieces fit together, and overall I think Chamberlin does that very well.
June 2, 2025
An impressive synthetic work, complimented with primary sources from the US side(especially from the Nixon years, Chamberlin’s speciality- it’s crazy how much they recorded- and how damning those conversations are). Chamberlin compellingly argues against the Cold War being a period of “long peace” just because the US and USSR did not directly go to war against each other.
Despite how impressive and well-written this work is, it is not exactly a fun read. Every chapter is filled with depictions of massacres and atrocities committed, mostly on civilians, by essentially every nation depicted. The US terror-bombed North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Chinese Communist Party starved out entire cities in the civil war, killed millions both directly and indirectly in the Great Leap Forward, and would sponsor anyone to advance their interests internationally, including perhaps the worst regime of the 20th century in the Khmer Rouge. The Soviets, meanwhile one up’d the Americans with their total war tactics in Afghanistan.
It was not just the great powers committing atrocities, however. Within Chamberlin’s “South Asia” most of the killing was done by the inhabitants themselves. This includes Koreans and Vietnamese in their traumatic civil wars, Pakistanis in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Cambodians en masse during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, and so on. An undeniable takeaway from this is the immense capacity for evil by all humans, when inspired by Chamberlin’s three main categories of “ideology, religion, or ethnic strife.” Or in some cases, a combination of the three.
Though I do not buy all of his arguments, and do not knock US/China policy in the Middle East/Afghanistan in the 1980s as hard as he does, this is still an excellent update to our theoretical considerations of the Cold War. Decolonization was just as potent a force as the Cold War in shaping the post-WW2 international system. Both forces and the violence accompanying both need to be studied in tandem, as Chamberlin compellingly shows through this work. I also appreciate his elevation of China as an essentially equal "pole" in the Cold War with the US and USSR, and the brief sections he spends suggesting it was the US-China alignment that led both to victory in the Cold War.
Despite how impressive and well-written this work is, it is not exactly a fun read. Every chapter is filled with depictions of massacres and atrocities committed, mostly on civilians, by essentially every nation depicted. The US terror-bombed North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Chinese Communist Party starved out entire cities in the civil war, killed millions both directly and indirectly in the Great Leap Forward, and would sponsor anyone to advance their interests internationally, including perhaps the worst regime of the 20th century in the Khmer Rouge. The Soviets, meanwhile one up’d the Americans with their total war tactics in Afghanistan.
It was not just the great powers committing atrocities, however. Within Chamberlin’s “South Asia” most of the killing was done by the inhabitants themselves. This includes Koreans and Vietnamese in their traumatic civil wars, Pakistanis in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Cambodians en masse during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, and so on. An undeniable takeaway from this is the immense capacity for evil by all humans, when inspired by Chamberlin’s three main categories of “ideology, religion, or ethnic strife.” Or in some cases, a combination of the three.
Though I do not buy all of his arguments, and do not knock US/China policy in the Middle East/Afghanistan in the 1980s as hard as he does, this is still an excellent update to our theoretical considerations of the Cold War. Decolonization was just as potent a force as the Cold War in shaping the post-WW2 international system. Both forces and the violence accompanying both need to be studied in tandem, as Chamberlin compellingly shows through this work. I also appreciate his elevation of China as an essentially equal "pole" in the Cold War with the US and USSR, and the brief sections he spends suggesting it was the US-China alignment that led both to victory in the Cold War.
January 18, 2020
This is the type of book that I look for when I am buying a contemporary history: broad in scope, covering multiple theatres of action. The author describes the wars in Asia in three waves: 1945 to 54, primarily centred around China and Korea; 1955 to 1975, primarily centred around Vietnam but including Indonesia; and 1975 to 1989 (the end of the Cold War), primarily centred around Iran and Afghanistan.
This is a very good way to categorize the periods. To extend the analysis to today, a fourth wave, primarily centred around non-state organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, would be useful.
In all these cases, Chamberlin looks at the effect of policy decisions, related to the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the USA, on the conflicts.
One of the weaknesses of the book is that Chamberlin attributes a lot more "motive" to the USA than to the Soviets. This is likely due to the USA's records being more open to him than the Soviet's, but it does unbalance the work somewhat. It often seemed like Chamberlin felt that the USA was the only really independent actor and that everything else happened because of others reacting to it.
Given the Cold War focus of the book, some other conflicts, notably those involving Malaysia, are left out because the USA was not involved. Similarly, the Arab-Israeli wars do not fall into this pattern.
The biggest weakness of the book, for me, was that the author was very repetitious. He would tell us what his conclusions were, then tell us the details leading to his conclusions, and then recapitulate the conclusions. This is an effective teaching technique, or way to present material to an audience, but it begins to wear out a reader over the course of 560 pages.
I liked this book, but I would have liked it more if he hadn't covered the same ground three times in each chapter.
This is a very good way to categorize the periods. To extend the analysis to today, a fourth wave, primarily centred around non-state organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, would be useful.
In all these cases, Chamberlin looks at the effect of policy decisions, related to the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the USA, on the conflicts.
One of the weaknesses of the book is that Chamberlin attributes a lot more "motive" to the USA than to the Soviets. This is likely due to the USA's records being more open to him than the Soviet's, but it does unbalance the work somewhat. It often seemed like Chamberlin felt that the USA was the only really independent actor and that everything else happened because of others reacting to it.
Given the Cold War focus of the book, some other conflicts, notably those involving Malaysia, are left out because the USA was not involved. Similarly, the Arab-Israeli wars do not fall into this pattern.
The biggest weakness of the book, for me, was that the author was very repetitious. He would tell us what his conclusions were, then tell us the details leading to his conclusions, and then recapitulate the conclusions. This is an effective teaching technique, or way to present material to an audience, but it begins to wear out a reader over the course of 560 pages.
I liked this book, but I would have liked it more if he hadn't covered the same ground three times in each chapter.
June 5, 2020
One of the best books I've read detailing the brutality of the Cold War as waged in the Third World, i.e., the "Global Cold War". The Odd Arne Westad book which coined this term remains #1 in my mind, but this one is not exactly competing with it -- for example, Westad's book has very little on the early proxy wars in East Asia, and I think nothing(?) on the genocide in Bangladesh. So I think of Westad's book as providing a set of fascinating/little-known case studies on the effect of the Cold War in the Third World, whereas Chamberlin here gets much closer to a full temporal "survey" of the entirety from 1945-1991. There are a good amount of issues -- I guess mainly revolving around the amount of attention paid to some aspects of the proxy wars vs. others (for example, even though it does a good job of "de-centering" the US in a sense, the Bangladesh chapter focuses on Nixon+Kissinger quotes and embassy cables for my liking (I want to know the context *in* Pakistan/West Pakistan/East Pakistan/Bangladesh that led to the genocide) -- but it's overall great and important and serves as a nice complement to his more zoomed-in last book ("Global Offensive") about the PLO's role in the Cold War.
September 2, 2019
Thoroughly researched and detailed summary of post-WWII conflicts in Asia. It covers a lot of horrible events but gives good context in terms of how the conflicts fit into the mindset of the Russians, Chinese and Americans. It covers a few things in more depth that are sometimes overlooked: Indonesia and the PKI, the Iran-Iraq war, Cambodia, Lebanon and Bangladesh. The parts on Vietnam and Korea and Mao is more well-trod ground. But I found the book moves quickly and always tries to frame the issues in an international context, so you always feel like you understand how things got to the point they did. I thought the last third (Middle East) didn't fit as neatly into the original framing of the book. It probably deserves it's own book which means I will read his earlier book on the PLO.
October 6, 2024
The individual vignettes in this book are good, but they are not woven together well. The basic argument of the book--the Cold War was not peaceful--is loose and the author doesn't do much to refine this argument or connect the conflicts he describes to a clearer thesis. Also his choices of which conflicts to include seems arbitrary. For example, he focuses heavily on the Lebanese Civil War despite it only having elements of a Cold War proxy conflict as opposed to an ethnic-religious conflict, but almost entirely omits more direct proxy conflicts in Africa and the Americas. The biggest issue with the book, though, is that chunks of it seem derivative of other histories, most notably Gary Bass' The Blood Telegram. Also must every Afghan war history include the stale anecdote that Mike Vickers was trained to drop behind Soviet lines and explode a small nuclear weapon?
November 28, 2020
A solid book with a big idea that it presents effectively. The idea that the Cold War superpowers were often tools of their purported proxies isn’t revolutionary, but it’s a point that is developed effectively here—but also linked to the growing prevalence of sectarian and ethnically driven nationalist programs as secular leftism encountered a succession of key defeats. Seeing the massacre of Indonesian Communists as perhaps the key shift in the momentum of the Cold War is a notion I’d never considered before, but Chamberlin makes an interesting case. There were a few errors I noticed here and there—can’t remember right now what they were... they weren’t deal-breakers, just things an editor should have caught here and there.
August 14, 2022
This is a really incredible book which everyone should read. Basically, this book is a detailed outline of the following conflicts:
-The Chinese Civil War
-The Korean War
-The Vietnam War
-The events in Indonesia covered by the Jakarta Method
-Bangledesh
-Cambodia
-Lebanese Civil War
-The Iranian Revolution
-The Iran/Iraq War
-The Soviet/Afghanistan War
...and more.
I had wanted to read more about Latin America in the Cold War, and this book doesn't cover that. I had also wanted to read about Cypress and Greece but they are only mentioned in passing here. However, the amount of detail on the above conflicts really makes this worth the read. It is also illuminating to consider Yugoslavia in light of what I learned in this book.
-The Chinese Civil War
-The Korean War
-The Vietnam War
-The events in Indonesia covered by the Jakarta Method
-Bangledesh
-Cambodia
-Lebanese Civil War
-The Iranian Revolution
-The Iran/Iraq War
-The Soviet/Afghanistan War
...and more.
I had wanted to read more about Latin America in the Cold War, and this book doesn't cover that. I had also wanted to read about Cypress and Greece but they are only mentioned in passing here. However, the amount of detail on the above conflicts really makes this worth the read. It is also illuminating to consider Yugoslavia in light of what I learned in this book.
October 14, 2023
Lots of killing, zero-sum mentality and totalizing world views are bad.
I appreciate how he puts the rise of revolutionary Islam in the context of the Cold War - as a reaction against both communism and capitalism.
He also clearly shows the lack of unity amongst communist forces - the China-USSR split, Cambodia and Vietnam fighting. It's easy to say in hindsight but US policymakers seem just very mistaken in thinking that if any country went communist it would automatically position itself unconditionally with the USSR against the US.
I appreciate how he puts the rise of revolutionary Islam in the context of the Cold War - as a reaction against both communism and capitalism.
He also clearly shows the lack of unity amongst communist forces - the China-USSR split, Cambodia and Vietnam fighting. It's easy to say in hindsight but US policymakers seem just very mistaken in thinking that if any country went communist it would automatically position itself unconditionally with the USSR against the US.
January 4, 2024
A decent book that contributes to a better understanding of the scope of confrontations between USA and USSR. However, I have two main points of criticism regarding this book:
1. The analysis is kind of superficial on certain aspects. Often, the writing comprises of just a presentation of historical incidences without trying to explain in depth why certain measures were taken. Furthermore, the references in the book are too few imo.
2. From my understanding of history, the author appears to have a left leaning bias. As much as it is refreshing to read something that deviates from some standard narratives of history, some parts of the book were portraying the USA and its allies too negative, while USSR and allies were seldom the object of harsh critique. As an example you can compare the sections about Vietnam with the ones about Afghanistan.
1. The analysis is kind of superficial on certain aspects. Often, the writing comprises of just a presentation of historical incidences without trying to explain in depth why certain measures were taken. Furthermore, the references in the book are too few imo.
2. From my understanding of history, the author appears to have a left leaning bias. As much as it is refreshing to read something that deviates from some standard narratives of history, some parts of the book were portraying the USA and its allies too negative, while USSR and allies were seldom the object of harsh critique. As an example you can compare the sections about Vietnam with the ones about Afghanistan.
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