The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War

by Norman Stone

After World War II, the former allies were saddled with a devastated world economy and traumatized populace. Soviet influence spread insidiously from nation to nation, and the Atlantic powers—the Americans, the British, and a small band of allies—were caught flat-footed by the coups, collapsing armies, and civil wars that sprung from all sides. The Cold War had begun in earnest. In The Atlantic and Its Enemies , prize-winning historian Norman Stone assesses the years between World War II and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. He vividly demonstrates that for every Atlantic success there seemed to be a dozen Communist or Third World triumphs. Then, suddenly and against all odds, the Atlantic won—economically, ideologically, and militarily—with astonishing speed and finality. An elegant and path-breaking history, The Atlantic and Its Enemies is a monument to the immense suffering and conflict of the twentieth century, and an illuminating exploration of how the Atlantic triumphed over its enemies at last.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Ebooks, Politics, Military Fiction, Military History

668 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Norman Stone was a Scottish historian and author, who was a Professor in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. He is a former Professor at the University of Oxford, Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is an interesting book for what it is and for what it tries to be but isn't quite. The subtitle of my edition is A Personal History of the Cold War. I'm not sure why the history is a personal one. Maybe it's personal for his account of 1968's Prague Spring, which he tells through his own experiences as a "spear carrier." Perhaps it's personal because the tone isn't academic or even all that formal. It's prose leaning toward the casual. It reads as if Stone is telling a story, which he certainly is. He tells it with credibility and insight. but he sometimes lets himself become prey to a style or stance trying to avoid sounding pontifical, and that in turn leads him to conclusions which often have the whiff of personal opinion. Worse, he can let tact slip, as when Jimmy Carter's "scrawny wife" is mentioned, or when he writes about a Congressman's affair with a "whore."

To me it's not so much a history of the Cold War as it is a history of the West and the NATO Alliance, the Atlantic of the title. While most of the key events of the Cold War are mentioned, they aren't related as if they form part of a confrontation. The successes and failures of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, France, and the whole cast of involved players between 1945 and 1990 are detailed, but those successes and failures aren't given weight relative to the broad ideological and (almost) military friction underlying all of geopolitics during those years. Instead it reads like a historical narrative of the West, casually told, as I say, in which the critical themes we associate with the East-West political confrontation called the Cold War--the long disagreement over Berlin, the nuclear arms race--receive their due attention in the story but aren't analyzed as part of a conflict. Even given that the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Korean War were more direct and dangerous clashes, Stone still focuses his analysis on the economic and political events of the individual player nations without placing them exactly in an adversarial context vis a vis those traditionally considered their enemies. Much of the story is economic. Stone seems to be a strong swimmer in the arcane currents of economic and monetary policy. It's easy for a reader without that kind of compass to get lost.

While not exactly what I thought it was going to be, it's still an interesting history full of engaging insight. Stone is aware, for instance, of the importance America's huge and advanced war machine is to her business and economic health. Interestingly, he says that Vietnam became the symbol of the failure of Johnson's Great Society and, more, that if Vietnam hadn't existed it would have had to have been created. Equally interesting, he ends the book, in a chapter called "Ending History," not with the fall of the Soviet Union but with the fall of the Thatcher government in Britain.

[Boudewijn · Rating 1 out of 5]

A rambling account of the Cold War, that jumps from place to place and from one subject to another, without any structure and reads like a monologue from the author.

[David Nichols · Rating 2 out of 5]

While it purports to tell the story of the Cold War, this overlong volume by a distinguished WWI historian is actually a a grab bag of topical essays, some pertinent to the volume's subject and some not. Stone begins with an able account of the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and a detailed, if sardonic, narrative of the Communist revolution in China, to which he adds an intelligent chapter or three on the rise of the European Community. His narrative threads unravel in the second half of the book, however, in which Stone chooses to grind axes (get it?) rather than properly finish his story. Thus, he tells the reader more than s/he would like to know about the stagnation of '70s England, British educational policy in the 1980s, the excellence of General Pinochet's economic shock therapy in Chile (detention camps and torture chambers dismissed as a liberal hallucination), the political history of Turkey in the 1980s, the nabbiness of the Kurds, and the awesomeness of Maggie Thatcher, for whom Stone worked as a speechwriter. He throws in a gratuitous 10-page biographical note on his incarceration in Bratislava for good measure. Stone's clipped prose style and amusing anecdotes keep the narrative moving during the first half of this book, but the second half, thanks to its narrative disunity and focus on obscure subjects, is a real drag.

[Alex Nagler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I should have known from the get-go that the author was a Thatcher speech writer that I'd have some issues with his take on things, but I didn't expect it to cloud his vision to the extent that he would declare on numerous occasions that Richard Nixon did nothing wrong during Watergate, which was not his fault.

From there, things spiral as he writes mini essays on topics that are only tangentially related to the Cold War. Other items have been better stated by numerous other authors and at greater length. This serve as sort of a greatest hits album. I'd imagine many of the things he's wrote on are refutations or comebacks of things people have zinged him on.

Also, everything seems to be Jimmy Carters fault. Including sweaters and solar panels.

Overall: Pass. If you want a real history, avoid this like the plague.

[David Cheshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

An outrageous, opinionated romp through the Cold War, "proving" that the Thatcher/Regan decade of the 1980's was the brilliant climax of world history and a missed opportunity because we lost the faith... So ideologically as suspect as a snake-oil seller. But also hilarious: the pen-assassination of Jimmy Carter's alleged cissiness and Edward Heath's face (like 'an angry baby') are scurrilous high- (I mean low-)lights. If you like serious, objective, balanced, academically respectable history, avoid this like the plague. For everyone else a dodgy must-read.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quirky and disappointing. Stone views the Cold War as "the War of the British Succession" , fought between the US and the Soviet Union, but his mostly Eurocentric perspective is simplistic.

Stone has the irritating habit of making every key point that he wants to make at least twice, and he spends way too much time discussing the internal politics of Chile and Turkey, both of which underwent revolutions during the late 1970s, at a time when the West appeared to be in steep decline. There's also a lengthy "Note" in which Stone describes his three-months' imprisonment in Czechoslovakia for attempting to smuggle somebody over the border into Austria. Stone is good on the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe and the good and bad points of the economic boom of the 1980s. But for a straightforward history of the Cold War, look elsewhere.

Writing about Pope John Paul II, for example Stone's writing gets absurd: “He did not bother very much about the secular pieties, such as democracy, which he probably associated with ugly women and uneatable food, " and Stone claims that the Pope destroyed the KGB. There is no doubt that the election of a Polish Pope in 1978 and his return to his homeland one year later was a boost to the rise of the Solidarity movement. But neither the Pope’s moral authority nor his popularity in his homeland could prevent the imposition of martial law in Poland, could it? Solidarity became an underground organisation, a shadow of the mass movement it had been over the previous 16 months. It re-emerged as a serious force in Polish politics only later in the 1980s, a few years into the Soviet Perestroika.

The book is awfully written.Stone's sentences are rambling and convoluted, and his vocabulary is baffling. Many sentences must be read several times before you realize what Stone is trying to say, and even then you're not going to be sure. It often seems like Stone wants to impress the reader more than inform him. The author rambles on, with sentences and paragraphs that last forever, cluttering the page with confusion and disjointed thoughts, which he tries and fails to tie together with attempts at satire.

Eccentric and disappointing.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stupendous - and often provocative - canvas of the entire Cold War that illuminates and elucidates several aspects of this long-drawn ideological conflict that spanned continents. Quite a few of Professor Stone's verdicts may be contested - his estimation of Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan (though he balances himself towards the end) and especially of Salvador Allende and Pinochet - but the scope and the allure of this work is unquestionably striking...

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, an account of the cold war, from the post-war devastation to modern times

[Bill Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice to read a history book that is not totally dominated by liberal thinking.

[Abbe]

From Publishers Weekly

Stone builds on his expertise in the long 19th century in this very successful overview of a cold war whose end, he says, was a complete surprise. Intellectually, Marxism-Leninism in parts of the West was more of a vital belief system than in the East, where it was an orthodoxy Diplomatically, for every Western success there seemed to be multiple triumphs for Communist countries or Third World proxies. Militarily, a thermonuclear stalemate framed a spectrum of defeats in unconventional wars and insurgencies. Europe was moribund; America was uncertain. Then the U.S.S.R. imploded. The Western-generated forces of individualism and creativity might have been overshadowed, says Stone, but for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who he says personified their re-emergence. The Atlantic world boomed unexpectedly while the East was gridlocked and the Third World hobbled by ideologically based overextension and overmanagement, too arteriosclerotic to withstand the stress of reform. Stone's consistently vivid text presents history as a contingent process whose results are never ideal—but neither are they permanent. Illus. (June 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

The Economist
“[Stone] has a terrific eye for detail, bringing to life everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan’s White House with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase.... He captures well the West’s weakness, as well as the seemingly powerful challenge that eastern-style socialism posed to Western freedom.”

Michael Burleigh, Spectator
“Sparkling....The book’s importance is to remind us that the Cold War was an active contest, whose outcome was by no means certain....Stone has produced a powerful alternative to the Left ‘liberal’ reading of Cold War history, without sounding in the least triumphalist.”

New Statesman

“Stone’s eye for the telling detail gives his account of the cold war years an edge of authenticity lacking from more conventional histories.... A beguiling mix of grand narrative and autobiographical vignettes, The Atlantic and its Enemies is the one book that anyone who wants to understand the cold war as it developed must read.... [A] rich, exuberant and melancholy book.”

Wall Street Journal

“[Norman Stone] paints on a broad canvas, showing how the Cold War unfolded.... The West is currently engaged in a new sort of war, with radical Islam.... Meanwhile, the economy of the developed world is more precarious than it was in the darkest hours of the 1970s. Mr. Stone doesn’t stop to address the contemporary crisis, but The Atlantic and Its Enemies is an inspiring reminder that the West has risen to meet such challenges before, helped at crucial moments by bold leaders.”

Library Journal

“Stone, one of Great Britain’s most distinguished historians, now offers his own assessment of the period between the end of World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union.... [He] bring[s] decades of erudition to his analysis; moreover, he lived in Eastern Europe during part of the period under review and brings that perspective to his work as well.”

John Gray, New Statesman (London)
“Stone’s eye for the telling detail gives his account of the cold war years an edge of authenticity lacking from more conventional histories.... A beguiling mix of grand narrative and autobiographical vignettes, The Atlantic and Its Enemies is the one book that anyone who wants to understand the cold war as it developed must read.... [A] rich, exuberant and melancholy book.”

The Times (UK)

“Brilliant....A forthright, brave history, full of wit and humanity, and readable to a degree that will delight all but the green-eyed.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Guardian (London)
“[Stone] knows central Europe better than most historians, and has no sympathy with the ‘revisionist’ claim that the west started the conflict, or that both sides were equally to blame.... All of this is told in a lively or even rollicking fashion, and the word ‘personal’ in Stone’s subtitle is an understatement; idiosyncratic or downright eccentric might be more like it. The author is one of the great academic characters of our time.”

Boyd Tonkin, Independent (London) (UK)
“Wandering, opinionated, mischievous, the book is strung between two downfalls, that of the Third Reich in 1945 and the Soviet empire in 1989. Stone’s vagabond history rattles across one world-shaking scene of upheaval after another, from the Moscow-backed putsches of the late 1940s in eastern Europe via the 1960s’ feast of fools and the 1970s convulsions that led to the later triumph of Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet to the unpredicted foundering of Soviet power: Stone’s terminus, and his final vindication in the face of gormless academic fellow-travellers.... The book bristles with gleeful passages of lefty-baiting provocation....In these moods, part-Evelyn Waugh, part-Jeremy Clarkson, Stone just loves to goad the liberal left. Yet they alternate with hard-headed analyses of the financial shifts behind political façades (with a brilliant account of how Saudi oil-price manipulation helped sink the Soviet Union), virtuoso sketches of pivotal events (such as Papa Doc’s funeral) and enthralling, colourful swerves into memoir.”

Mark Mazower, Financial Times
“Pedantic historians are just one of Norman Stone’s targets in this swashbuckling survey of the cold war. Perhaps the most brilliant Europeanist of his generation, a man with an intimate knowledge of at least half a dozen countries, and the languages to match, he serves the reader a spicier fare than the pabulums provided by his more cautious brethren." _ _TusconCitizen.com
“What gives this hefty 668-page book its literary legs is how the author has vividly captured the atmosphere of the time and the moral and political crises that tempered strategies on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Its Enemies is full of surp

_ _TusconCitizen.com
“What gives this hefty 668-page book its literary legs is how the author has vividly captured the atmosphere of the time and the moral and political crises that tempered strategies on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic and Its Enemies is full of surprises."

_ _Bookviews.com
“Some works of history are so monumental that they are especially deserving of praise. This is the case of Norman Stone’s The Atlantic and Its Enemies.”

National Review

“Stone, the veteran British journalist and historian, has produced an original interpretative narrative that is idiosyncratic and downright odd in places.... Yet it is precisely Stone’s departures from the standard political-diplomatic themes that enable him to offer a fresh and provocative perspective on events we might have thought thoroughly familiar.... One of the beguiling charms of Stone’s narrative is the way in which his cool, understated prose bursts from the page at piquant moments, especially when describing the defects of political leaders of the 1960s and 1970s.... The Atlantic and Its Enemies [is] a worthy addition to the essential Cold War canon. Add it to your shelf.”

Pat Shipman, Professor of Anthropology at the Pennsylvania State University and author of Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari

“Nancy Marie Brown again uses her extraordinary ability to bring medieval time to life in_ The Abacus and the Cross_, in the person of the ‘Scientist Pope’ Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester III). Working from sparse records, Brown manages to tell us of the remarkable scholar, brilliant mathematician, and inveterate punster who loved both his holy orders and luxurious living. She shows us a time in which the route to God lay through the study of science and math and when intellectual developments flowed across the boundaries of religion and empire in Eurasia. This is a remarkable book that reflects on our modern times on every page.”

Jeff Sypeck, author of Becoming Charlemagne

“A pleasure to read, The Abacus and the Cross draws readers into a world of intrigue, superstition, and scholarship. Nancy Marie Brown writes lucidly about math and science, finding important stories in the lives of medieval people who deserve to be widely remembered.”

[Russ Spence · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this after being impressed by the author's previous work, a brisk account of the Eastern Front in the First World War, and found myself daunted by the fact that at over 600 pages long, it was around three times the size - hopefully three times more informative than a book that really impressed me. How wrong I was. I don't know where the problem lay; whether it was "a" history of the Cold War, so entirely subjective and based on the author' thoughts rather than experiences or historical facts, or whether a this was a work crying out for a decent editor to keep the author on track rather than going off into a cul de sac of opinion. There is probably a decent book in here, there are good sections, but on the whole it's an undisciplined rambling opinion fest where the author (deliberately?) correlation and causation (I don't think the US nearly lost the Cold War in the 70s because they let women in the army) as well as other stylistic excursions, any of which don't seem to directly refer to the Cold War itself, and is difficult to keep up with. Put it this way, the last few pages of the book, which was due to end around the time to the fall of the Berlin Wall, so you would expect to have some sort of conclusion, are instead spent on detailing where Reagan and Thatcher (his term, not mine, and I think he may have been a fan, although I may be wrong) went wrong on further education. A mess.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Norman Stone died while I was reading this book. According to obituaries, he was not a polemic figure, as the majority conveyed a bad message about him. The book itself is not actually academic history. It is Norman telling you what he thinks about history, and this comes of course with prejudices and sometimes mistakes. But also with delicious quotes and brilliant insights. It is an interesting book. I just took off points because it becomes very repetitive at some point.

[Old Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and fascinating read and so very relevant to Britain today.
It describes how communists/Marxists, across eastern europe, during and after WW2 accused anyone with a different opinion as being fascist. The voices of those who objected were simply drowned out.
Fast forward to Britain today and similar tactics are applied to those who don't follow the woke/London centric agenda.
This book should open our eyes to the risk of history repeating itself.

[Laura Avent · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I’ve ever read. Desperately in need of an editor. Sentences start and ramble and stop and restart and shuffle and by the end you have no idea what the author is trying to say. It was a slog to get through all 600 pages.

[Patrick Farrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book, but it eventually drifted into a series of essays as opposed to a continuous story. For instance about 500 pages in there was a ~20 page chapter on Tirkey that did not really fit with the flow of the book.

[Jim Foley · Rating 1 out of 5]

A disappointing slog of a book....

[Aditya Pareek · Rating 4 out of 5]

halfway through it becomes more of a history of economies. patricians delight but not the adrenaline junkie's.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frustrating. Rather than "A History", perhaps "One Man's History". He spends time on himself, and he is not so fascinating as to make that an improvement over dry relating of events.

He makes conclusive statements without support with some frequency, e.g., identifying James Baker as "unimaginative". Really? Why? What makes him that way? Instead, we are to take his word for it.

There is a wealth of information here, no doubt. Some of it is fascinating, for example, the telling of the story of Europe immediately after the War.

The contextualization of the massive amount of economic detail is absent, for the most part. He also gets lost at times, saying things like "four things resulted from ump-de-bump", and then only clearly identifying one. I reread one paragraph three times--if it was there, I gave up, and that is on the writer, not me. I ended up skimming when I felt he would spend pages on economic explanations that led nowhere.

He ends the book with a discussion of Thatcher's last days and why that was--it had nothing to do with the Cold War. Why put it there? Merely because he spent time with her? That book might be worth reading.

So, I am still waiting for the one or two volume history of the Cold War. If it is out there, lemme know!

[Pctrollbreath · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just not possible.

The first problem is that author seems to have mistaken the subject of the cold war for anything which happened to interest him since the end of second world war, although if the point interested him then he was happy to go back and discuss much earlier events.

The result is that we are subjected to bunch of absurd essays going into unwanted details on subjects such as late 70's and early 80's finance in Turkey and Chile. He even ends the book with a rant about the poll tax in UK. At the end you feel that what you have read is not so much a history as a list of authors personal hobby horses and attempts to point score agaunst his academic opponents. As a lot of this is only slightly related to the cold war, much of it comes across as waffle and padding.

The second problem with the book is the style of writing. The author just rambles with constant asides and diversions without getting to point. The only saving grace of the book is that some of these are laugh out loud funny. However most of time the author just rambles on without ever getting anywhere.

I would not recommend reading this book.

[Liam · Rating 3 out of 5]

"'no more a nation than the Equator'" (quoting Churchill on India, 12)

"'One disaster is better than a thousand pieces of advice.'" (Turkish proverb, 158)

"[T]he [British] businessman's definition of a knight was 'a man who failed to say no when he should have done.'" (321)

"There were stories as to the harmonization of condom sizes, the Italians claiming that they needed three millimeters more than the Germans, who took offense." (333)

"[T]he original of 'clown' is the Dutch word meaning 'peasant' ... and boors ditto." (529)

"A [Soviet] man died at seventy in 1969, at sixty-two in 1979, and infant deaths were not even recorded if they occurred in the first year." (539)

[Marty St. George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book because I have read very little about the Cold War, and from a purely historical perspective the book was great. If I can read a history book and get 4 or 5 insights that I've never heard before, that's a good read, and this book did not disappoint. The only area for improvement would be on the editing side. There were several spots where I was craving more info, but in the rush to get to the next story the details were lacking - and other sections dragged on for 2 or 3 extra pages. Also, there were several anecdotes that were repeated several times in the book, without any sense of awareness that the stories had been told before.

[Tim Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent if opinionated survey of the years 1946-91. Would rate it higher, except there were l-o-n-n-g-g-g passages devoted to the revolutions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Turkey that were outside the book's general scope and could have been shortened. The author is best when he sticks to relations among the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany.

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather long, but thorough. The author seems biased against Keynesian economics, which is fine with me.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant and opinionated.

[Ben Vos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely anecdotes. Too subjective, though very good on economics.

[Eleanor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm only giving this book 2 stars because it was so dense and full of information which led to it being a bit overwhelming! Yet, if you're looking for lots of cool facts and info this book is great!

[Dermot Nolan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't normally review books less than three stars as I don't normally wish to diminish the hard work of others. However, this is a terrible terrible book.