On the Cold War

My views on this piece are really mixed. On one hand, it’s a great skeleton of events for those who are new to the history of the Cold War. If a reader has never learned anything about the Cold War and just wants a quick overview, I’ll probably directly them to this book. On the other hands, it faces a lot of issues which can be categorized into two groups: organizational and analytical.

My qualms with the organization of the book is that it emphasizes superpower politics over all other considerations. There is a chapter on “Autonomy” that looks at the role of other states—whether they be France, Germany, China, Cuba, or somewhere else. Nonetheless, they still hone in only on the most “significant” events (from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, that is). I think that much of Gaddis’s discussion would be weakened if he spent time discussing politics and the role of “hot wars” during the Cold War—going to show that the Cold War was not inherently ideological or “Cold” at all, but—from the perspective of those on the ground—much more about tactical supremacy.

This ties into my criticism of Gaddis’s analysis. His highlighting the ideological aspects of the Cold War were definitely heavily discussed during the Cold War, but actions were not inherently ideological. Yes, the USSR and the US were the symbols of Communism and Capitalism, respectively, but their main goals were based around global mastery, and reliance on capitalism or communism were simply ways of achieving those goals. I think that this is most obvious when looking at the case of China, where a Communist country worked with the Capitalist superpower in order to have a better position in the global order, going on to weaken the Soviets.

Analytically, Gaddis also spends far too much time praising the icons of the 80s. They were undeniably important, but I don’t know that the Cold War would have come to an end simply because of them (which he does not explicitly argue, but the organization of the text points in this direction). I think his argument would have stayed stronger if he spent time looking at the fall of the Communist bloc as a response to the rise of alternative universalist ideologies—something he gets close to when he talks about Helsinki and the emergence of “human rights” (see The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History for more on this). Another example is the rise of political Islam, where the most illuminating example is the Iranian Revolution (taking place in three years after Helsinki, near the same time Deng Xiaoping consolidated power, and almost simultaneous to Margaret Thatcher’s election and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Pulling on these strings a little harder would have gone a long way.

In any case, this is—for the most part—a decent book and should be taken a look at. I think that it is inferior to Odd Arne Westad’s books (The Cold War: A World History and The Global Cold War), but those are much more expansive and require far more time than this one.