Review: The Cold War and The Global Cold War | Books | The Guardian

Review: The Cold War and The Global Cold War | Books | The Guardian

The superpowers' balance sheet
Surveys of the making of the modern world from John Lewis Gaddis and Odd Arne Westad cure James Buchan of his nostalgia for the cold war


James Buchan

Sun 29 Jan 2006 10.48 AEDTFirst published on Sun 29 Jan 2006 10.48 AEDT

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (333p, Allen Lane, £20)
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times by Odd Arne Westad (484pp, Cambridge, £25)

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war. Those were the days: political caution and circumspection, the survival (as if in ice) of old institutions and manners, history so slow you could even become tired of it. These two books, though about as different as they could be, use fresh material from Soviet, Chinese and US archives to remind us that the cold war wasn't that great.

The Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has been writing about Soviet-US diplomatic relations for more than 30 years. In The Cold War, he treats the conflict as over and done with, like the wars of the 18th century. He concentrates on the diplomatic and strategic competition between the superpowers in the European theatre and is, as an American professor should be, optimistic.
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Like the American civil war, the state of undeclared hostility between the US and the Soviet Union from 1945 to the late 1980s was "a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all". Gaddis is glad the cold war was fought as it was fought and won by the side that won it. Like some primary-school teacher, he hands out prizes for effort to pretty well everyone: Eisenhower, Nixon, Walesa, Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul, Deng Xiaoping and, above all, Gorbachev, who managed to defuse the whole contraption without it blowing up in his face.

Odd Arne Westad, the Norwegian-born scholar who heads the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and has hitherto concentrated on China and the Far East, is less sanguine. He believes that the cold war, far from being a conflict necessary to clear the ideological air, was a continuation, under new management, of the old European colonial enterprise. Westad, too, gives out prizes but only to the tragic failures: Lumumba, Cabral, Guevara, Gorbachev.

Each approach has its charm. It is pleasant, on reading Gaddis, to see the public events of one's childhood or youth gathered into a lucid and elegant narrative and, as it were, put away out of sight. Westad offers a philosophy of history that, though not wholly free of leftese, better accommodates 9/11 and the US occupation of Iraq. There is no wasteful overlap. Westad ignores Berlin 1948, Gaddis has nothing on Katanga 1964.

The phrase cold war was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the competition between the United States and the USSR after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Gaddis and Westad both find the conflict's origin in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in Russia. This was a challenge to US beliefs and power much more convincing than the bankrupt imperialisms of the western European powers.

The contest was both more perilous and, in the looking-glass world of the cold war, more safe when both camps acquired nuclear weapons of great destructive power. On March 1 1954, the US detonated a bomb in the Pacific with a blast 750 times more powerful than that which destroyed the city of Hiroshima nine years earlier. It is impossible to imagine circumstances where such a weapon would be used.

Still, there were some hair-raising episodes. Gaddis recounts the Soviet blockade of Berlin ("the testicles of the west", as Khrushchev called the western part of the city), the Korean war of the early 50s when Soviet and US air-crews shot at one another in the sky, the Sputnik shock of 1957, and the building of the Berlin wall in 1961. As for the crisis of 1962, when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba, Gaddis rejects the old view that Khrushchev was looking for a dirty short-cut to nuclear parity. Instead, he argues, the Kremlin was entranced by the Cuban revolution and desperate to protect the island from US invasion. It is one of many instances in both books where the superpower dog was wagged by the third world tail.

By the mid-1960s, the great powers had come to terms with what Winston Churchill had called "an equality of annihilation". The stage was set for the cool but pragmatic relationship known as detente and for the successful diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It was at that moment that the ageing Soviet leadership made two miscalculations.

In 1977, the Soviet Union deployed batteries of a new nuclear missile aimed at targets in western Europe. The weapon became known in the west as the SS-20. According to Gaddis, the Politburo took the decision on military grounds and without thought of any diplomatic consequences. As the Kremlin's American specialist, Georgy Arbatov, put it: "Most of our experts and diplomats found out about it through the western press."

The SS-20 killed detente while the US counter-deployment in 1982 effectively ended the arms race in America's favour. Otherwise so generous with laurels, Gaddis has nothing to say either for or against the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who, in accepting Jimmy Carter's offer of the Pershing-2, sacrificed his office, his political party and his fame.

While in the metropolitan countries from the 1960s onwards, the cold war was a conflict almost without violence, superpower rivalry helped to lay waste great tracts of what came to be called the third world. As both Gaddis and Westad point out, the superpowers deployed ideologies that were more or less unserviceable amid the sands or jungles. The Americans tended to view the whole world through their anti-communism and were misled by metaphors such as Eisenhower's of 1954: "You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and ... the last one ... will go over very quickly." The Kremlin could be won over by any revolutionary who mouthed the right Marxist-Leninist formulas.

The cold war mentality survived even after the Iranian revolution of 1979 showed that "clerical reaction" was more dynamic than Marxism-Leninism, and the US had a lot more than just red communism to confront. Here Westad comes into his own. Chapters on the conflicts in Angola and the Horn of Africa lead on to a marvellous account, drawn from Russian diplomatic archives, of the second great Kremlin miscalculation: the invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979. The Soviets feared, Westad writes, that the fratricidal Afghan communist party was about to go over to the Americans: "doing a Sadat on us", as it was known after the Egyptian president who expelled Soviet military advisers in 1972. The Soviet Union thus tied itself to a miniature political party that had no popular backing whatever.

For both authors, the Soviet Union had been riding for a fall. The draft Salt 1 treaty had acknowledged that, in terms of strategic nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was an equal power to the US. The victory of the North Vietnamese had been followed, in short order, by successes in Angola and Ethiopia. In the words of Arbatov: "If you get away with something and it looks as if you've been successful, you are practically doomed to repeat the policy. You do this until you blunder into a really serious mess."

The mess was Afghanistan. Westad is tempted to see the same pattern at work in the post-cold war world. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, the breaking-away of Russia's European satellites, peaceful political change in South Africa, Kuwait liberated, the Taliban sent packing: all that was cause enough for US euphoria. Then, bang, the catastrophe of Iraq.

Gaddis, in contrast, gives the last word to Mikhail Gorbachev. In his first meeting with George Bush Sr in Malta in December, 1989, the Russian drew up a cold war balance-sheet."By no means should everything that has happened be considered in a negative light. We have managed to avoid a large-scale war for 45 years. [But] cold war methods have suffered defeat in strategic terms. We have recognised this. And ordinary people have possibly understood this even better."

· James Buchan's Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World is published by John Murray