The Other Cold War

Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 484 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Why did the United States and the Soviet Union intervene so often in the affairs of distant, impoverished "third world" nations during the Cold War? It is a question that historians of international relations have sought to answer for many years, reaching back into the early stages of the Cold War itself. In the 1950s, the conventional wisdom among American historians held that both sides were driven by ideas—a noble dedication to liberty and self-determination on the U.S. side and a fiendish determination to dominate and indoctrinate on the other. Only with the publication of William Appleman Williams's seminal The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy in 1959, did scholarship move in a new direction. Americans asserted power in less-developed regions, argued Williams, not to uphold principle but to serve the interests of the U.S. economy by securing markets and raw materials. Additional interpretive possibilities have opened up more recently, with scholars highlighting geostrategic calculation, racism, political and bureaucratic imperatives, or personal proclivities of key policymakers to explain superpower behavior on the global periphery.¹

In The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, the Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad brings us full circle with a monumental new master narrative of the Cold War in the third world. Westad makes no bones about it: Ideology drove both the United States and the Soviet Union to intervene repeatedly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America despite the frustration, bloodshed, political turmoil, and damaging diversions of resources that their adventures usually brought them. More specifically, argues Westad, each superpower—one wedded to democratic capitalism, the other to communism—viewed itself as the quintessential embodiment of modernity and therefore as the nation best suited to the task of bringing progress to the rest of humanity. "Locked in conflict over the very concept of European modernity—to which both states regarded themselves as successors—Washington and Moscow needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies, and the elites of the newly independent states proved fertile ground for their competition," Westad contends. "Both saw a specific mission in and for the Third World that only their own state could carry out and which without their involvement would flounder in local hands" (p. 4).

To be sure, Westad breaks in at least one key respect with the earlier generation of authors who put ideology at the center of the story. While the older scholarship celebrated U.S. motives and castigated the Soviets, Westad condemns both in equal measure. For him, both superpowers were, despite the contrasting content of their ideologies, remarkably alike in their motives and in their impacts on the areas where they intervened. Each arrogantly championed itself as the culmination of human progress. And each, by arming its third-world surrogates and imbuing their conflicts with high purpose, fueled grueling wars that took devastating human and economic tolls. Westad even suggests a parallel in the ultimate consequences of the superpowers' behavior in the third world. The Soviet Union crumbled in part because of its missteps in Afghanistan, where it was defeated by Islamist guerrillas in the 1980s. Resentments caused by U.S. behavior in the Muslim world during and after the Cold War might yield the same result for the United States, warns Westad, who proposes that the September 11 attacks mark just the beginning of attempts by the world's "impoverished majority" to turn the tables on Western nations with a long track record of meddling in their affairs. "Without a genuine reorientation of its foreign policy, American democracy may end up suffering the same fate as Soviet socialism," he concludes (p. 406).

The Global Cold War is thus a deeply provocative book that will engage—and possibly enrage—scholars with...