The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times [Hardcover]

Westad's book offers a new interpretation of the second half of the twentieth century, one that focuses on how the conflict between the US and the USSR-- and the division of the world into two halves-- played out in the Third World, and shaped and was shaped by the politics of those regions. The first two chapters are fairly heavy going, as Westad lays out sweeping statements about first the US, then the USSR, arguing that both countries developed around ideas that committed them to an almost evangelical form of statehood, of exporting their way of life. As he moves into the middle of the book, however, the story really takes off; he offers well-informed, fascinating case studies ranging from Angola and Ethiopia to Iran and Afghanistan. In every case, he illuminates the way in which the US and USSR offered only two sides on the playing field, and how people in these Third World countries responded by playing the superpowers off one another. One of the central processes that he brings to light is the way in which this situation eventually encouraged the rise of sectarian movements in many of those countries, including fundamentalist Islam, which appears here as a natural development from a generation who had watched their predecessors cast in with one of the two superpowers, and end up pawns in a global chess game. After finishing this book, I felt that I had an entirely new perspective on American history in the 20th century and better understood current-day issues from the rise of Islam to American support for Israel to the politics of central Africa. Certainly NOT a light read, but an invaluable one.

This is by far the best book available about the Cold War in the Third World. I have been waiting for a good book on this subject for quite some time, and I was not disappointed.
Westad starts out with a broad overview of American and Soviet history with particular emphasis on the importance of ideology and expansionism. He shows that the Cold War was primarily an ideological struggle between two powers that occurred at a time when when many new nations were coming into being due to European decolonialization. The two forces contributed to the radicalization and violence of the Third World in the Cold War.
Westad does an excellent job of providing both wide scope and in-depth analysis of a number of conflicts. He covers Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Iran, Afghanistan and Central America. Unless you are an expert in all these conflicts, you are sure to learn something from this book. I am somewhat familiar with a few of them and found no major inaccuracies. And Westad does a great job of integrating them together into a tight narrative and argument.
My only complaint is that the book ends with an argument against "intervention." After 400 pages of explaining why past interventions were so important to the direction of modern history, it seems a bit of a contradiction to the rest of the book. But this is just a tiny criticism of an otherwise great book.

The core of this book is what appears to be very detailed notes of official Soviet correspondence related to the wars in Afghanistan (1979-1989), Angola (1975-1976), and Somalia-Ethiopia (1974-1978). It is padded with much less-detailed, less recondite information about Cold War operations in Latin America, Indonesia, and the Arab World (mostly the former South Yemen). That, in turn, is further padded with some "analysis" that highly damaging to the book's value as history.

The first layer of "padding" includes most of chapter 3 ("Creating the Third World"), in which Westad races through an unmanageably long itinerary of newly liberated colonies of Western Europe, or else Latin America. This is actually valuable at times, especially if one follows the endnotes: Westad focuses on the destructive aspect of the US in the 3rd World to 1960, and documents it with many non-radical sources. However, Westad is apparently convinced that the former colonial powers or Latin states were entirely without agency of any kind; so the result is that he can simply treat the US as a malevolent black box.

Westad is clearly far more sympathetic to the Soviets, probably because his research tends to pursue Soviet motives through (a) official memoranda to (b) a series of compelling motivations. In contrast, the motives of US figures are documented through informal tapes, and not pursued. The Soviets are therefore portrayed as cautiously evading conflict, and responding only to multiple US provocations; the Usonians are portrayed as omnipotent louts whose behavior requires no explanation.*

The most damaging aspect of the book lies in what I called the "outer" layer of padding. It's padding because it purports to be "analysis" of the overall sweep of events, but it shows clear signs of having been included as boilerplate. First, Westad entirely ignores the role of Europeans. Oddly, the East Germans are represented frequently as having independent influence; the French, almost never. Westad claimed this was because he believed the 3rd World, not Europe, was the "real" theater of the Cold War. This is silly, because Europe was still a participant in the 3rd world. I think there are two other reasons he didn't mention.

1. First, acknowledging the colonial powers as as having agency would have made everything more complicated. Instead of being 4/5ths padding, the book would have been highly distilled and required enormous effort to write.

2.Second, Westad has no desire to indict capitalism, just the US. This book has a remarkably crude, even Manichaean, view of historical causality. There is no inner division within the USA, and no sharing of agency among Western elites. Westad allows for deep turmoil and complexity in the Soviet leadership, but not in the "Western camp."

This becomes spectacular in his attempts to blame the entire poverty of the 3rd world on the USA, rather than acknowledging Europe's share of responsibility. His economic narratives presuppose, for example, omnipotence by the US government, complete ability to anticipate consequences, and complete discretion.** Likewise, he "blames" the US for creating the IMF in order to "Americanize" developing nations; the real reason was that the IMF was vital to the new recovery scheme, in which growth rates were delinked from gold. Again, the Western European contributions to both demands for and approval of US policies are ignored, for clearly invidious reasons.

Those interested in finding a better thought-out and more accurate indictment of US economic/security policies should consider Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, which is infinitely superior.
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*It's understandable that Westad might simply be kinder to the USSR because it lost, and the USA survived. No doubt he regards the USSR as the natural defender of native rebellions against oppressive neocolonial polities. But rather than really make his case, he uses very manipulative language, such as endlessly following the death toll from each US intervention with a figure representing the same percentage of Americans; for example, 30K Nicaraguans killed in the civil war there, followed by 1.2 million (the same percentage of Americans as 30K is of Nicaraguans). He does nothing like this for the Soviets.

** For example, he claims the US caused the debt crisis by "deliberately" driving its currency up (1980's); in fact, the US government was trying to stop galloping inflation at considerable expense to its own economy. He mixes up real and nominal interest rates, and blames US deficits for a global credit crisis (the US public deficit in the early 80's was not unusually large as a share of GDP for OECD countries in that time period).

Fiscal and monetary policies of large countries accommodate interests inside and outside that country. In a crisis like the period 1971-1984, no policy option could avoid causing widespread unhappiness. In any parallel universe, any alternative course of action could have been deemed "selfish." And so on.