Wars of the Cold War: Campaigns and Conflicts, 1945-1990 (review)

It is no shame to bite off more than you can chew. David Stone, a retired British officer and prolific military writer, covers some of the military high points of the forty-five-year period we remember as the Cold War. He delivers some serviceable narratives before losing focus in a welter of sociopolitical musing at the end.

Stone begins with some "non-wars" of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Airlift, Soviet suppression of the Hungarian and Czech revolts, and the Cuban Missile crisis. He includes a brief net assessment of the two treaty organizations, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, revealing a weakness for quantitative comparisons—divisions, tanks, aircraft—that have always looked alarming but need to be put into context, very little of which Stone provides. The longstanding Soviet quantitative superiority was never taken for granted east of the inner German border, while in the West it was frankly assumed that a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict could never remain subnuclear. What stabilized the Cold War in spite of the conventional force imbalance in central Europe was, of course, the strategic nuclear balance and the powerful concept of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). Stone acknowledges the utility of MAD while simultaneously blaming it for fueling the nuclear arms race, a simplistic interpretation of a nuanced concept.

Beneath the strategic nuclear umbrella a plethora of wars broke out that involved the superpowers to greater or lesser degrees within carefully observed regional bounds. Stone competently summarizes the most significant of these: Korea, the French and American wars in Vietnam, the Malayan insurgency, the Algerian revolt, the Arab-Israeli wars, several African wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the Iran-Iraq War. However, military professionals will learn relatively little that is new, as Stone paints from a thin palette of secondary sources. Writing at length about the battle of Dien Bien Phu, he overlooks Bernard Fall's definitive Hell in a Very Small Place; likewise, in his narrative of the Arab-Israeli wars he bypasses Trevor Dupuy's Elusive Victory. With regard to the Soviet war in Afghanistan Stone does his best with a few dated sources written mainly from the Mujahedin perspective, but a skilled historian would recognize the glaring absence of detailed information about the Soviet conduct of the war. (A definitive work awaits further inroads into the Soviet-era archives of the General Staff, and/or declassification of the National Security Agency's extensive intelligence reporting on the war.) Throughout his book Stone also makes extensive use of the Orbis "War in Peace" series of monographs, which are excellent in many respects but must be regarded as tertiary sources.

Stone's judgments about the American war in Vietnam deserve some comment. It is common enough to overcredit a naïve, sensationalist media and the antiwar movement for America's defeat, but Stone goes a step further. President Nixon, he claims, betrayed South Vietnam twice: first by seeking a negotiated peace agreement instead of allowing Saigon to carry the ground war into the North after the Hanoi's 1972 "Easter Offensive" had been halted; and secondly by promising South Vietnam that the U.S. would retaliate if Hanoi violated the Paris Accords—a promise "Nixon must have known he could not honour." Neither claim can withstand much scrutiny in light of what was known at the time, and Stone seriously undercuts his credibility as a historian in putting them forward.

The final chapter of the book is a long, tendentious op-ed piece, rooted in the disaffections of a conservative ideology rather than sober analysis of the underlying trends in the post–Cold War era. In one bizarre passage Stone warns: "the excessively high profile accorded to human rights and civil liberties issues must be rationalized and modified, so that they are at the very least balanced by common-sense and lawfulness to reflect the needs of the majority rather...