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by Odd Arne Westad (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition
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Length: 667 pages

As Germany and the n Japan surrendered in 1945 there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the huge power of the USA and USSR and the near-total collapse of most of their rivals created a unique, grim new environment: the Cold War.

For over forty years the demands of the Cold War shaped the life of almost all of us. There was no part of the world where East and West did not, ultimately, demand a blind and absolute allegiance, and nowhere into which the West and East did not reach. Countries as remote from each other as Korea, Angola and Cuba were defined by their allegiances. Almost all civil wars became proxy conflicts for the superpowers. Europe was seemingly split in two indefinitely.

Arne Westad's remarkable new book is the first to have the distance from these events and the ambition to create a convincing, powerful narrative of the Cold War. The book is genuinely global in its reach and captures the dramas and agonies of a period always overshadowed by the horror of nuclear war and which, for millions of people, was not 'cold' at all: a time of relentless violence, squandered opportunities and moral failure.

This is a book of extraordinary scope and daring. It is conventional to see the first half of the 20th century as a nightmare and the second half as a reprieve. Westad shows that for much of the world the second half was by most measures even worse.

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Review
"The Cold War evinces a lifetime of research and thought on the subject. Compelling ideas and valuable insights appear frequently."--National Interest

"[An] epic account...One reason Mr. Westad's narrative is so strong is its use of fresh archival sources from across the globe...How Big Was the Cold War? is easy to answer: It was huge, as this book demonstrates, not only because of the perilous stakes but also because of the size of the two main actors. How Deep Was the Cold War? is also easy to answer, and Mr. Westad does that so very well, showing how it reached into so many places in the world that were a long way from the Berlin Wall."--Wall Street Journal

"[A] big, serious, and thoroughly intelligent stud[y] of the cold war."--New York Review of Books

"[A] fast-paced narrative peppered with delightful snippets from a broad range of sources... this volume should sit on the bookshelf of every home as a constant reminder of how stupidity, ignorance and arrogance almost brought the world to annihilation. With the personification of all three traits now squatting in the White House, this book has real and current value."--South China Morning Post

"[A] riveting historical compendium."--Independent

"[Westad] ably synthesizes contemporary scholarship to produce an accessible narrative that provides a fresh perspective on the conflict's pervasive global influence... an impressive feat that will be appreciated by scholars, students, and general readers."--Publishers Weekly

"A clear and well-written summary of a global conflict... an impressive book."--The Times

"A sweeping study.... In astute, thematic chapters, Bancroft Award-winning historian Westad offers an excellent sense of the ideological conflicts fulminating since the late 19th century that formed the crux of the Cold War.... This is an enormous story, and the author tackles it with admirable clarity and elegance.... A tremendous and timely history lesson for our age."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"An account of the Cold War that is truly global in its scope... a wise and observant history... It also arrives at a moment when we must grasp the dynamics of the Cold War if we want to understand some of today's most urgent developments, from North Korea's acquisition of long-range nuclear missiles to the rise of socialist movements in Western democracies."--New Republic

"Arne Westad has produced a grand narrative of the Cold War. Defining it as a struggle between capitalism and socialism as well as a bipolar international system, he brilliantly illustrates its ideological, geopolitical, technological, and economic dimensions. Westad, the world's foremost scholar of the Cold War, once again dazzles readers with the scope and depth of his analysis."--Melvyn P. Leffler, Professor of American History, University of Virginia --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Book Description
A major new history of the conflict that shaped every aspect of our world. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 2128 KB
Print Length: 667 pages
Publisher: Penguin; 01 edition (31 August 2017)
Sold by: Penguin UK
Language: English

ASIN: B074749S9V
Text-to-Speech: Enabled 

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Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, detailed and easy to read global history of the cold war.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 October 2018
Verified Purchase
Whilst much of the headline history is familiar, there is a wealth of new material that draws together global events, many of which are overlooked in other accounts. The picture the author reports is detailed and yet very readable. This should make it of interest to all. The author's comments seem to be balanced and unbiased, so that one comes away with a better understanding of the main characters, their successes and failures.
I am certainly recommending the book to family and friends.
13 people found this helpful
--
brian E Gooch
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 May 2019
Verified Purchase
The book is interesting but very American bias. Russia had a very big task in creating their state and when the Germans sought to systematically wipe it off the face off the earth and failed it was in no condition to oppose a very wealthy USA. America had a prosperous war m/c raring to show everyone I won.
5 people found this helpful
--
OL
4.0 out of 5 stars An unusual and useful perspective on twentieth century history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 March 2019
Verified Purchase
I enjoyed this book immensely. It starts with the revolution in 1917 and ends with the fall of the Soviet Union. Meticulously detailed and very accessible. My only regret is that it ends too soon:.Putin has rebranded the Cold War, it ain't over yet.
4 people found this helpful
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J Ayers
5.0 out of 5 stars informative
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 October 2018
Verified Purchase
informative and well written; recommended by History A level teacher as extra reading if intending to apply for Oxbridge.
8 people found this helpful
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T
4.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 February 2019
Verified Purchase
Bought for my son and he tells me it's a really good book, well researched and very easily understood.
One person found this helpful
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The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad – review

A huge single-volume history of the power struggle between the US and USSR from 1945-89 is packed with detailed research and food for thought

Ian Thomson

Mon 28 Aug 2017 18.00 AESTLast modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018 10.50 AEDT

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cosmonaut yuri gagarin meets harold macmillan at admiralty house london in july 1961

 Man of the hour: Yuri Gagarin meets Harold Macmillan at Admiralty House, London, July 1961. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

With its shadowy John le Carré atmosphere, communist eastern Europe was a melancholy place in the late 1980s. The Estonian capital of Tallinn typically teemed with Russian money-changers (“Comrade, we do deal?”) and prostitutes from Uzbekistan and other parts of Islamic central Asia. The television in my hotel room was detuned from Finnish to Soviet channels but I was able to pick up Dallas or Miami Vice from across the Gulf of Finland. Guests were forbidden to visit the 21st floor, which officially did not exist. KGB officers (it is now known) had a room up there where they monitored Helsinki radio waves and the hotel’s 60-odd bugged rooms. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the matchbox-sized Minox camera had been invented in Tallinn (by one Walter Zapp, in 1936): it was a favourite with cold war spies.

As Odd Arne Westad relates in The Cold War: A World History, Estonia was a display case for Mikhail Gorbachev’s long-held plan to transform the monolithic face of communism and east-west tensions. In the last days of the cold war, the Russian leader made much of the “Estonian model”, by which individuals were allowed to make profits at work but without surrendering (too much) to capitalist enterprise. Ahead of the game, Tallinn instituted a number of self-financing co-operatives ranging from a public lavatory (where you could relieve yourself for 20 kopeks) to a pie-shop selling cheburechnaya Tatar meat pasties. The singular world of the cold war meant that one half of Europe was dining out expensively, while the other half was standing in queues for meat pasties.

In November 1989, however, the Berlin Wall was breached and Soviet authority began to unravel. On Christmas Day that historic year, the Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a military firing squad. By the time the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania petitioned for independence soon after, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse; in 1991 the Russian president Boris Yeltsin (reportedly fired up by vodka) officially put paid to the USSR’s existence when he outlawed the Communist party within Russia. Considering the magnitude of what happened, surprisingly few people died in the twilight months of the cold war.

Westad, the Norwegian-born scholar who heads US-Asia Relations at Harvard University, reminds us that the term “cold war” was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to denote capitalist-socialist antagonisms between the United States and the USSR after the defeat of Nazi Germany. It is often asked how a cold war was possible when Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt had been such strong allies in the second world war, yet their alliance was entirely opportunist.

Until 1941, when Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany (not the US) was communist Russia’s chief ally. A secret protocol in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had left Stalin free to annex Estonia, Latvia, western Lithuania and eastern Poland, while Hitler was able to overrun western Poland. Beyond their ideological differences, Hitler and Stalin were united in their determination to carve up the Baltic states and Poland between themselves. In many ways, Westad suggests, Hitler was the only person Stalin ever trusted. He distrusted Trotsky, his former allies Zinoviev and Bukharin, the politburo, his generals and even his own family. Yet in the Führer the great vozhd (“Boss”, as Westad calls Stalin) placed a rare confidence. Intelligence reports had reached Stalin about Hitler’s impending invasion, yet he chose to ignore them. At its peak between 1945 and 1989, the cold war was born of these geopolitical complexities and miscalculated allegiances.

In well-researched if occasionally bland-sounding pages (“The world had changed tremendously in the 1970s and early 1980s, and in the late 1980s it changed even more”), Westad chronicles US-Soviet strategic competition in the south-east Asian theatre and in the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In many ways, the cold war was a continuation of the old European colonial enterprise and the bankrupt imperialisms of the western powers, Westad argues. An important facet of the cold war was Russia’s competition with America into space. In 1961 the Soviets stole a march on their rivals when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to break the bonds of the Earth’s gravity. Notably, both the US and the USSR co-opted ex-Nazi German ballistics experts to engineer their space programmes. Distinctions between the ideological left and right were not always obvious in the cold war.

Today, western attempts to contain radical Islamism continue an us-and-them mentality. Angry Muslims decry the perceived depredations of US imperialism and the infidel free market; the threat posed by suicide bombers makes the old east-west rivalries look almost manageable by comparison. Westad’s huge, single-volume history is the beginning of wisdom in these things.

• The Cold War by Odd Arne Westad is published by Allen Lane (£30). To order a copy for £25.50 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99





Odd Arne Westad's "The Cold War: A World History"

BEHIND THE BOOK
ODD ARNE WESTAD'S "THE COLD WAR: A WORLD HISTORY"
December 01, 2017


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Odd Arne Westad is the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard University, where he teaches at the Kennedy School of Government. He is an expert on contemporary international history and on the eastern Asian region. Before coming to Harvard in 2015, Westad was School Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, he directed LSE IDEAS, a leading centre for international affairs, diplomacy and strategy. Professor Westad won the Bancroft Prize for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. The book, which has been translated into fifteen languages, also won a number of other awards. Westad served as general editor for the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War, and is the author of the Penguin History of the World (now in its 6th edition). His most recent book, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, won the Asia Society’s book award for 2013. Professor Westad’s new book, The Cold War: A World History, will be published in 2017 by Basic Books in the United States and Penguin in the UK. A new history of the global conflict between capitalism and Communism since the late 19th century, it provides the larger context for how today’s international affairs came into being.

As Germany and then Japan surrendered in 1945 there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the huge power of the USA and USSR and the near-total collapse of most of their rivals created a unique, grim new environment: the Cold War.

For over forty years the demands of the Cold War shaped the life of almost all of us. There was no part of the world where East and West did not, ultimately, demand a blind and absolute allegiance, and nowhere into which the West and East did not reach. Countries as remote from each other as Korea, Angola and Cuba were defined by their allegiances. Almost all civil wars became proxy conflicts for the superpowers. Europe was seemingly split in two indefinitely.

Arne Westad's remarkable new book is the first to have the distance from these events and the ambition to create a convincing, powerful narrative of the Cold War. The book is genuinely global in its reach and captures the dramas and agonies of a period always overshadowed by the horror of nuclear war and which, for millions of people, was not 'cold' at all: a time of relentless violence, squandered opportunities and moral failure.

This is a book of extraordinary scope and daring. It is conventional to see the first half of the 20th century as a nightmare and the second half as a reprieve. Westad shows that for much of the world the second half was by most measures even worse.

REVIEWS

In many ways, Westad has long argued, the Cold War made the world what it is today. His latest book is an eloquent and enjoyable defense of that proposition. - Foreign Policy

A clear and well written summary of a global conflict...An impressive book. -The Times

For generations, the cold war was context, the inescapable setting of political life. the history sets the Cold War itself in context, within the greater landscape of world history, deeply understood and masterfully presented. It is a powerful synthesis by one of our greatest historians. -Timothy Snyder, Author of Bloodlands

The Virtual Book Tour was brought to you by HKS Library & Knowledge Services. As of Spring 2019, our faculty video series is called Behind the Book. Please direct inquiries to Alessandra Seiter, Knowledge Services Librarian.

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Transcript

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Odd Arne Westad:

I needed two reasons why I wanted to write this book now, and probably the most important one is that we are at the stage where a lot has been written about to Cold War but it is in pieces. It is about different aspects of the Cold War on a global scale. And what I tried to do in this book is to take some of that wonderful literature and some research that I'd done on my own and put that together in an overall syncretic account. And that's the main aim of the book.

And I think the timing is right for that is because of the quality of research that has been undertaken. And then secondly, there is the overall availability of sources. Only a few years ago, it was really hard to get at some of the materials that I've been using for writing this book. Of course they were still classified, they were still secrets or they were held in archive where there simply was no access whatsoever. It's those two things coming together that makes it possible to write, I think, a very different kind of book about the Cold War now from what you could only a few years ago.

What I tried to do in this book is to put the Cold War within a broader perspective of 20th century internationalized. And I want to look at this not in the usual way of taking some starting point in the 1940s when the Soviet Union and the United States had a falling out and then going up to Gorbachev and the 1980s. I wanted to put it within a framework that looks at it in terms of how 20th century history really from the latter part of the 19th century, developed first of all, in terms of ideological divides. What I say in this book is that there was a Cold War in terms of ideologies, in terms of the conflict between capitalism and socialism. That was there well before the United States and the Soviet Union became the predominant world powers after the Second World War.

And you can't understand the Cold War, the old understanding that origin. When I'm talking about going back to the late 19th century, I don't just do that as backup. I do it as an integral part of the story, which I don't think you can understand the Cold War without also understanding that. Also in terms of the generations involved because so many of the people who had leading rules to play, at whatever level during the Cold War, themselves came out of that background. They a born in the very last part of the 19th century. They had gone through very difficult times in the early part of the 20th century and that's what made the stakes so high. This overall framing of it, I think is really, really important for what I want to say.

What's so interesting about teaching the Cold War today is that the new generation who grown up, of course not knowing this, in a personal sense as an international system at all, tend to think of it understandably very much in terms of how they understand international affairs today, which is very interest based. Which is very based on national security issues, oriented very much towards the state that they come out of. It's very hard to understand the ideological intensity of the Cold War. It's also difficult to understand, I think, how high the stakes were, the kind of risks that people were willing to take during the Cold War in order to further their own positions. It was a battle for the future of the world.

Given what I said earlier, round about the interests that people had in securing that their ideological alternative actually won, based on how things had really not worked in the early part of the 20th century. That intensity is very hard to understand from today's perspective. This is part of what I'm trying to do with this book is to speak to a generation that hasn't really had any practical experience whatsoever with the Cold War and say, "Look, things may seem are very chaotic today in terms of international affairs. Even very, very dangerous. But in many ways it pales in comparison to what was the situation when you had two nuclear armed superpowers coming up against each other, both willing to take exceptional risks with the future of the world in order to make sure that their ideological alternative came out of it."

I think the current conflicts between the United States, Russia and rivalries between the United States and China, are connected to the Cold War. Not in the sense that there are direct continuations of the Cold War in itself. I don't think that's true. A lot of people today are talking about a new Cold War between the United States and Russia. It's a conflict, but it's not a Cold War, A, because Russia is not important enough for that in terms of the international system. But even more importantly, because Russia does not have the ideology, the anticapitalist communist ideology that fueled the Soviet Union into becoming a global power. But that said, it is clear that on the Russian side, and on the Chinese side, much of the thinking is connected to how the Cold War ended. Putin's regime feel that they were marginalized, that they were isolated by the way the Cold War ended. Putin himself never tires of saying that the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical catastrophe.

And of course if you see it from a perspective of someone who grew up in what used to be the other superpower and is now at best in terms of his thinking, a regional power within Eurasia, it's important to understand that perspective. And likewise in China there's this idea that the Chinese have to have something of their own that they present, which we hear with the meetings that are happening in the Communist Party at the moment. Also very much goes back to the Cold War. I need to distinguish what they do from both United States as a predominant power does.

I think there are many lessons for policymakers from the Cold War. The most important one is that it is of much greater significance to concentrate on incremental improvements in terms of relations with others, in terms of how the whole international system develops, rather than on big breakthroughs and opportunities that might be there to change the system rapidly to one's own advantage. Even with the best of intentions. I think that's perhaps the most important lesson of the Cold War that so many times during that conflict, the best became the enemy of the good. That in order to achieve the maximum results in terms of one's own beliefs, chances, not just for lessening intentions, but for actually achieving real progress in social and economic terms were put aside.

The other important lesson I think is that diplomacy is significant. Particularly in the kind of cases where you are dealing with countries that you have very profound disagreements with. Diplomacy can be an incredibly frustrating process and very often during the Cold War it was tremendously frustrating. But the success that diplomats, and especially I would say, American diplomats, had in making the world a less dangerous place, to making sure that alliances were built, that economic relationships were extended, that whole countries got the time that they needed to go through the transformations that came from within. That to me, is one of the biggest successes of the Cold War, and that's an important lesson for today as well.