Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe by Lorenz M. Lüthi (review)

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War’s end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).

Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi’s focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.

The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi’s detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat’s desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that...