The Cold War: A New History

The 'dean of American cold war historians', John Gaddis, opens the second chapter of his book with a surreal scenario. Even history buffs like me disbelievingly read the first few lines with consternation, and then the fiction begins to sink in. It's 1950. In response to South Korean and American troops' buildup near the Korean demilitarized zone, the Soviets drop two atomic bombs on two South Korean cities. In response, General Douglas MacArthur takes matters in his own hands and orders the atomic bombing of two equivalent Soviet cities. Escalating the horror, the Chinese prepare to arm themselves with more atomic bombs and answer a blow with a blow... Fortunately, we know that this did not happen. The Yale historian's point is that it could have, and it's all too easy for us, ensconced as we are in 2006, to look back on those days and underestimate the colours of a very different world from today's. Gaddis's superb and succint cold war history should (finally?) convince us why capitalism is not just about inivisble hands, profit making, and competition. With his lucid prose and authentic historical passages, Gaddis makes it clear that the cold war was not a fight between communism and capitalism, but surely one between democracy and totalitarianism. One of the big questions we ask today is if capitalism and true democracy necessarily go hand in hand. Although a black and white answer to this question is probably still not possible (especially with China always threatening to be a nice exception to the rule), history makes it clear that they mostly have to. The reason is that only free expression and free actions can encourage competitions between every citizen of a country. In case of China, I get the feeling that the world should bide its time... The cold war, then, was a competition between the wielders of power whose anchor was historical infallibility, and those who learnt from their fallibility. The first part of Gaddis's book is an eloquent account of 1940s and 50s US-Soviet relations (that inevitably involved the rest of the world). Based on the latest declassified US, Soviet, and Chinese archives, Gaddis narrates the political aspirations, misunderstandings, and convictions of all the major players that defined the era. In doing so, he dispels many illusions that persisted for a long time in the minds of both historians and the lay public alike. These revelations serve as painful reminders of a time when decisions were taken based on ignorance, ignorance that has begat the world in its current state of affairs, and that will resonate in political and social undercurrents for a long time to come. For example, it is now almost a proven, known fact that Joseph Stalin had neither the conviction nor the resources to wage in any significant conflict with the US. In Europe as well as in Southeast Asia, the Tsar of the proletariat deftly played on the many misunderstandings about the Soviet Union and its policies that US officials harboured. Many times these misunderstanding bordered on paranoia about Soviet nuclear attacks. However, these also gave plenty of opportunities and excuses for the Soviets to build more nuclear weapons and advance the cause of Marxist-Leninist principles. Stalin could not have engaged in any conflict during the 1940s and 1950s, simply because his country had fought the most brutal and exhausting war in its history, leading to unbelievable losses of about 10 million lives, both civilian and military (US losses in comparison, numbered a 'mere' 300,000). Much of the Soviet industrial capacity had been destroyed, compared to the then thriving US economy. The morale of the people was still recovering from its nadir, and at such a time, even an iron-handed tyrant like the Soviet premier could not have exercised his will according to whim. At the same time, Stalin was hardly one to shirk from exploiting any opportunity for expanding the sphere of his noble communist principles. Everytime, the shrewd dictator offered the US the bait of imminent communist takeover. Everytime they took it. Of course, there was some justification for the US in doing this, given its fear of communism. What Stalin understood was that he could use satellite communist states for creating a false facade of the so-called 'domino effect'- the belief that once one state is overrun by communists, every state nearby will continue to do so, until an entire continent becomes submerged under the Kremlin's boot. This was not really true. As Gaddis propounds, Stalin found the opportunity to use the aspiring communists Mao Zedong (China), Kim Jong (North Korea), and the tenacious Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) to further his communist interests. Even if their particular communist interests were not simply in being cronies of Stalin, still they were worshippers of the leader of the greatest communist country in the world, and Stalin knew better than not to use their influence to at least project a threat of world communist domination. However, the US kept on misunderstanding motives of these leaders that led to increasing and uncalled for American presence in Korea, Africa, and finally the debacle in Vietnam. The concept of threat leads naturally to that of non-alignment. Any able military leader knows that psychology plays a pivotal role in influencing the 'enemy's' choices and actions. Stalin understood this better than anyone else at the time, and was a master geopolitical thinker. It is not conflict but the threat of perceived conflict that sculpts international relations. Whereas the US fell for the threat of communist domination, the Soviets fell for that of acute nuclear retaliation. They also used this threat to develop more nuclear weapons of their own. Both powers were kept in check by MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction- wonderfully epitomized in Kubrick's outrageous and all too realistic Dr. Strangelove). After Stalin however, the US seems to have understood this concept only too well, and they implemented it in the form of the well known detente and containment principles which they applied to US-Soviet relations. As for non-alignment, Gaddis lucidly explains how every state from Yugoslavia (Tito) to Taiwan (Chiang Kai Sheikh) to Egypt (Gamal Abdel Nasser) to India (Nehru) exploited and even abused this preorogative to project a different kind of threat; the threat of succumbing to occupation or influence by the other side. I chuckled when I read how this principle enabled these small nations to force the great powers to do a balancing act. It was really simple. What these small states were saying was, if you don't strengthen our economy/give us military aid/quell our political unrest, we may defect to the other side, or at the least, we may get embroiled in civil war which will lead to the other side occupying us anyway. Compelling examples, as Gaddis notes, of "tails wagging the dogs"! Is is also heartening to see that in many ways, democracy does seem essential to capitalism, at least the 'American kind' of capitalism that we are accustomed to. Give people more choices, allow dissent and constant improvement in the polity, and then only can competition lead to a thriving free market with maximum incentives. It is one of the greatest ironies of history that the very people that communism aspired to free and empower were its greatest and most brutally oppressed victims. The mother seems to have found it necessary to murder her own children to apparently 'empower' them. In the list of genocidal dictators, Marshall Stalin definitely tops the list, surpassing even Adolf Hitler in purging the state of the maximum number of its own citizens and dissidents. Stalin's angel of death was the infamous sadist and rapist Lavrenti Beria, a brilliant operative nonetheless, under whose supervision, something like 10 million 'dissidents' were murdered in the Soviet Union (As much of a monster as he was, credit must be given to Beria for being the administrative architect of the Soviet bomb. See Rhodes). This single fact should convince anyone of the sheer maniacal idiocy of the kind of communism that prevailed during the time. However, it seems that communist leaders have always been in an informal competition with each other to top each other's deeds in mass murder. Where Stalin executed millions in his gulags, his somewhat unwilling protege Chairman Mao gladly implemented an 'experiment' that led to the single greatest humanitarian tragedy of the century; the starvation to death of almost 30 million citizens as a result of Mao's warped execution of collectivized agriculture. I believe that this is the most compelling case against communism; that in every instance, its practioners have had to resort to outright violence and mass murder of citizens in order to 'empower' them. What better demonstration of a failed philosophy than one that needs to actually and paradoxically contradict itself in order to secure itself. Reductio ad absurdum. The very fact that a wall had to be put up in Berlin indicates the inherent dissatisfaction with communism that abounded in people's minds. Unfortunately, the world failed to stop the gory debacle, at least not before the literal factory-like butchering of millions. There is much in Gaddis's book that is revealing, and I can touch on only a few tidbits here. The revelations stride across well-established notions about well-known events. The Cuban missile crisis for example; contrary to universal belief that the attempt was part of a direct threat to the US by the Russians, Gaddis recounts how it was first and foremost, an attempt by the Russians to provide support for Castro's government, a government in which they first did not believe in, but which they later ecstatically supported with the hope that Castro would set an example and bring communism to Latin America. It is also instructive to note again, how the US and the Soviet Union got embroiled in Castro's grievances in Angola and Ethiopia where they had no business in the first place, and whose sovereignties did not even interest them too much (and apparently don't ever since then). It was not a case of eating the cake, but simply being too terrified of letting the other person eat it. This pattern of preventive (preemptive?) conflict continued into the 70s, in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Nuclear weapons continued to be an ugly motive and part of decision making during the cold war. Even today, we lament how, in the face of these apparent Soviet threats, the US constructed a nuclear arsenal of absurd proportions; meaninglessly more than what it would need to effect deterrence. Some credit must be given to people like George Kennan (containment) and Kissinger (detente) who saw political diplomacy as being more effective than shows of military might. In retrospect, one can only note with irony, that in spite of the US lead in nuclear weaponry and all the hullabaloo about being first in the arms race, it was the USSR which made the first H-bomb that could be delivered by air, and also developed the first ICBM capable of carrying a nuclear warhead in 1958, events which massively upped the ante. This made treaties outlawing some or the other aspect of nuclear weapons only partially successful, since because of asymmetry in weapons arsenals or delivery systems, no treaty could bring complete security to either side. And yet the efforts of scientists and politicians who strove to implement these treaties, no matter that they were born out of rightly inculcated fear of nuclear war, should be applauded. Gaddis also devotes a section to how Americans kept on reinforcing their faith in the rule of law even when their leaders sought it fit to trangress constitutional principles abroad in the name of 'national security'. After all, every president upto and including George W. has been doing it. But the history of cold war America still provides hope that ordinary people's convictions for the overarching importance of constitutional principles over law will finally prevail. Gaddis narrates how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, all undertook to give explicit or tacit approval for all kinds of covert actions, especially by the CIA. As is known now, this involved everything from government coups to surveillance to assasination attempts. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an embarrassing attempt at toppling Castro's government. In the beginning, people actually supported presidential decisions like these. The apologetic phrase was 'plausible denial', a phrase that I am sure makes the rounds of the administration everyday now. But gradually, and especially when Johnson authorized large-scale Vietnam bombings that escalated the war, people began to take notice and protest. Gaddis notes how Nixon carried the principle to the extreme, when he began to engage in covert action against his own people. That was too much to take for the egalitarian Americans, and Watergate is now history. It is heartening to read this part of American history, where people constantly reminded even the most powerful man in the world, that he is not above the rule of law, that subversive and damaging actions even in foreign lands cannot be justified in the name of national security. Where are those people now? Interestingly, it is precisely these passages of Gaddis's book that lead me to question his apparent neutrality as a historian in some instances, when he finally comes to the Reagan administration. Gaddis praises this period as the period when common men turned the tables on authoritarian regimes. Gaddis calls these men as unusually proficient- not surprisingly- actors...Gaddis's list of leading men (and the sole woman) includes Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and a host of popular rising leaders from Eastern Europe, whose views were first suppressed, then mildly neglected, and then grudgingly approved by the Kremlin. The reasons for the Kremlin's astonishing transition is mainly, according to Gaddis, the result of a single man's conviction and efforts- Mikhail Gorbachev. Gaddis thinks Gorbachev was the single greatest deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He cites his constant struggles with the Reagan administration, he cites Reagan's cocktail party humour that served to mitigate tensions more than once, and he cites the contribution of all his other actors noted above, all of whom began as common men and women. It's of course encouraging to see that it was the common man who brought about the eventual downfall of Stalin's once brutal regime. The regime had since been gradually but surely made more tolerant by every successive Soviet leader, either because of genuine concern, or mostly because of accomdations with the West that became necessary for diplomatic and economic purposes. But it was Gorbachev who finally drove the nail into the coffin, or at least handed over the nails to his successor Boris Yeltsin. It seems that many times, he did this simply through inaction. In 1989, the Chinese were the sole officials to use brutal force to suppress the Tiananmen square protests. No such thing on a comparable scale happened during that decade in Eastern Europe, although opportunities were plenty. Everywhere, people were destroying once venerated symbols, breaking down barriers, and cutting through barbed wires. For the Soviet Union, it had become both infeasible and too costly, to keep on maintaining its sphere of influence. Reagan and Bush took full advantage of this. In witty, idealistic, even religious speeches, Reagan denounced the 'evil empire'. But what about Reagan's own evil actions in Latin America, where he was following the tradition of his predecessors to suppress left-wing uprisings and install right-wing governments, no matter how oppressive? What about the Iran contra deal? I was struck by the fact that Gaddis does not devote much space to these discussions. And then it struck me that maybe I was expecting too much from the man, when I found out that he is an active supporter of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Since history has repeated itself, there is no reason, I suppose, for Gaddis to change his views. The most striking insight to come out of Gaddis's book was the reasons he explores for assesing capitalism's success. Granted that democracy was more successful than domination. But after all, everybody since Marx had believed that capitalism would end up causing conflicts between capitalists, and that collapse and revolution would have to take place sooner or later because of inequality between the rulers and the ruled. And we do have to admit that the twentieth century was much more of a century of totalitarian regimes. What happened then? What no communist visionary had banked on was the self-correcting, progressive nature of modern capitalism. The real difference between the two systems is that of dogma versus flexibility, what Gaddis calls 'spontaneity'. As a scientist, I appreciate this eternal skepticism and lack of deference to authority. Communist nations have justified their actions and dreams mainly on the basis of anecdotal evidence from history and historical infallibility. Capitalist nations have always learnt from their mistakes and have never tried to assume systems as being foolproof. They have made concessions to workers, the poor and the oppressed, and have strived to raise living standards for the unfortunate. When capitalism realised the macabre circumstances which impossible war reparations enforced upon Germany in the aftermath of the first world war- an experiment that finally went horribly wrong- it learnt from its mistake and implemented the Marshall Plan for the restoration of Europe. Capitalism, in this guise, is hardly the capitalism Marx, Lenin, or Stalin imagined and opposed. In fact, we get the feeling that Karl Marx would have been profoundly disappointed with the communism of Lenin and Stalin. The very fluidity of capitalism ensures its constant self-appraisal and development. And that again reinforces the connection between capitalism and democracy that has been noted. Without freedom of expression and the power to make choices, without agreeing to disagree with each other, how can there be progress? Finally, it simply does not seem that communism is compatible with human nature. How can someone ever have the incentive to progress if the state is confiscating part of their wealth everytime they earn it, in the name of bringing about 'equality'? Growth needs incentives, and those incentives lie in unlimited possibilities, not unyielding consequences. Modern day capitalism may not have great equality to begin with. But it does have equal opportunities; equality exists at least as a realistic goal. Freedom only cements this edifice. Gaddis says that even as late as 1950, writers were questioning the apt definition of democracy; is it freedom without equality, or equality without freedom? In the communist bloc, it seemed that leaders were prepared to sacrifice freedom for the proverbial equality that their philosophical fathers advocated. But in reality, not even equality remained in the end. No freedom, and still no equality. Only the shrads of textbooks and manifestos that propounded lofty principles. A grotesquely failed enterprise indeed. Gaddis says in his preface that many American students today have scant knowledge of, and interest in, the struggles that underpinned the existence of two superpowers for almost fifty years. Gaddis rightly says that instruction in this history is important, because it illustrates how flimsy even assured perspectives and predictions can be. I believe it is important for another reason. Twentieth century history has shown that democracy with all its merits, is neither infallible nor inherently strong and influential. Why else would the century have been dominated by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot? The self-appraisal of capitalist states that Gaddis expounds on is probably not just a key feature, but an essential one. Democracy seems to be like a tightrope walker. You have to keep balancing, keep asking, keep doubting and progressing, simply to stay in the act. Excelling takes even more efforts. Bad democracies are as prone to totalitarian takeovers as completely devastated nations. Progress does not ensure stability. No matter what percentage of the population is educated, no matter how modern thinking is, no matter how generously wealth is distributed, war and collapse can be surprisingly close for any nation (look at Germany in the twentieth century). Democracy in principle faces the same danger of succumbing to a notion of historical infallibility that communism did. And the more democracy succeeds, the more this danger actually becomes realistic. The message of self-improvement and 'spontaneity' is the one that seems be the most enduring in Gaddis's book. In current circumstances, I believe it has become even more timely, because we longer live in a world that is divided more or less unambiguously between 'bad' communists and 'good' capitalists. The demons we fight today seem to be the ones from within. These would be the toughest to identify in the first place, which is all the more reason to keep the message in mind. History should help us to do that.

The Cold War was unique in that it was a truly global conflict, even more so than WW2 and definitely WW1. It touched upon and radically transformed European nation-states, turning them from Imperial/colonial superpowers into welfare-states, aspiring for greater unity and transformation. It completely overturned South America by making it a battlefield of ideologies as has happened most notoriously in Nicaragua, Chile, and Cuba. The struggle over the dominance of the latter one almost led to another world war, this time with nuclear and hydrogen bombs. This conflict has given Africa facelift. At the beginning of the XX century, the continent was dominated by France, UK, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, and Germany while at the second half of it, new, independent states sprang up from the ruins of those colonial empires. These states faced incredible challenges and many of them descended into anarchy, others managed to play off the superpowers against each other and attempt to establish modern, prosperous states. Asia, for the first time since the medieval times, became once more the centerpiece of global history: China turned communist, India, Indochina, Gulf- states, all of them achieved liberty and the hegemony of the West and Japan was broken. During the Cold War the world became increasingly tri-polar: Beijing, Washington and Moscow called all the shots. Nevertheless, it was still a battlefield, a place for proxy wars and impressive yet terrifying attempts to mold people themselves, like the Cultural Revolution in China or the Islamic Revolution in Iran. John Lewis Gaddis is a well known and a renowned Cold War historian yet this work is sometimes a bit lacking and at times hard to follow. If you are looking for an in-depth study of the conflict that lasted for five decades and encompassed the globe this is not it. This is simply an overview of the most important events and personalities that shaped the course of the War, which sometimes got hot as in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The main issue I take with this book is not that it is too long or too short or that it brushes over certain historical occurrences in just a couple of paragraphs but its choice of how to approach the topic. All of those aforementioned issues are not really issues because as a historian you have the prerogative to prioritize how much importance you want to put on things/events/personalities as your research has indicated that those events perhaps were not that important. However, some issues, like the Vietnam War or Cuban Missile Crisis are oddly absent and the roots of those conflicts are left for the reader to research. Nevertheless, the main drawback is how different themes of the conflict are approached. Even though they generally follow a chronological and a geographical pattern, it is still difficult to discern what is happening and get the whole picture. The Cold War was a global conflict and the fact, that very abstract themes like "Hope" are chosen makes the topics harder to grasp. However, when it comes to positives, this book has many. Firstly, a very interesting and in fact, funny, style of writing make the book much more enjoyable to read. Sometimes it reads like a good novel with metaphors and good biographies of the leaders. Additionally, the author covers all the major themes even if sometimes there are things you would like to know more about. The chapter about the non-aligned countries is particularly interesting to read for the new and unheard material is brought up, which we largely do not associate with this conflict. Fors instance, how smaller countries like Nationalist China (Taiwan), South Korea and even South Vietnam all had at one point or another threatened the US, that their governments might collapse if the US does not send aid. A similar role for the USSR played China, especially in the Taiwan crises of 1954 and 1958. Another interesting example is between China and France. Both of these states were thorns in the sides of their respective greater allies. France unnerved the US with its going alone stance and China continuously attacked the USSR and claimed it was not a truly socialist country. Finally, the number of details, citations, and variety of argument presented in most chapters allowed for a great visualization of this epic struggle between nations, states, ideallogies and ultimatelly, people.

If I could give this book 6, 7, or 10 stars, I would. It was a fantastic read, despite the fact that I consider myself extremely well-versed in the events of the Cold War, many of which I lived through. By using information classified at the time or based on the memoirs of Soviet leaders, Gaddis creates a sweeping, fleshed-out portrait of this extraordinary period of history in which Europe and America had made war so horrible that direct war between the great powers became unthinkable leading to the longest period of peace in European history, despite nasty peripheral wars through proxies such as in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, or Afghanistan. Gaddis is not just a stellar historian but an exquisite writer. "Can't you cover more years with fewer words?" readers of his longer books once challenged him. This book is evidence that he could do just that and do it well. He makes connections that are original yet so compelling that you wonder why you had not thought of them yourself. There is no fluff in this book; every word fits. He is able to begin with a gloomy Orwell in 1948 writing his anti-totalitarian opus whose title was borrowed from the year it was written, last two digits transposed, then end in the 1789 French Revolution with a paraphrasing of Abbé Sieyès: "we survived." And thankfully Gaddis does not succumb to the temptation of many historians who should know better to go for the cheap, flashy "new, never revealed" revisionist sensationalism when trying to write for the general public. This is not a re-writing of the Cold War with some new pop theory, but a thoughtful and thorough exploration of what actually happened. That the book can make old events breathe with new life without resorting to cheap tricks is testament to the author's skill. Unlike many writers covering the Cold War, Gaddis has no soft spot for socialism or its more brutal distillation, communism. He evokes the horrors of the mass murders, loss of freedom, suppression, and catastrophic economic failures without any attempt to put lipstick on that pig. "No tyrant anywhere had ever executed a fifth of his own people, and yet the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot did precisely this in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The future will surely remember that atrocity when it has forgotten much else about the Cold War, and yet hardly anyone outside of Cambodia noticed at the time. There was no trial for crimes against humanity: Pol Pot died in a simple shack along the Thai border in 1998, and was unceremoniously cremated on a heap of junk and old tires." Wonderful, perhaps evocative of Trotsky's ash heap of history remark, reversed. For Gaddis does not conceal that in this struggle, he was partial, as we all should be. This was not a struggle between two relatively equal systems, either of which could have suited humanity, but of a brutal, oppressive, and largely ineffective system that in the end could deliver on none of the promises of its founders and leaders. The predictions of Marx and later Lenin - that capitalistic countries would collapse from internecine wars for markets and the rising up of an increasingly class conscious working class - never bore fruit, as the author points out repeatedly, except perhaps in reverse. Gorbachev emerges as the unwittingly essential actor in bringing down the Soviet Union, not because he wanted to but because he did not understand until it was too late that one could not have openness and self-determination side-by-side with a brutal system that simply had not worked for over 70 years and likely never would. Reagan comes across as a visionary, an unusual depiction in an academia generally hostile to Reagan whose "evil empire" and "tear down this wall" directness are often mocked as simplistic or naive. There is much about Reagan to dislike, but he was right as rain about communism as well as the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons (an impulse that was sincere and gets less attention than his peace through strength posturing). If you think there is nothing new about the Cold War you could learn, read this book - you will be pleasantly surprised. If you are a student, who, like his students, hardly remember the events he is describing, this is an excellent, comprehensive overview.

Gaddis has done an excellent job of telling an extremely complicated history in a tight and well-written volume. The importance of his story is contrasted by his reminding the reader that his college students today have almost no living memory of the Cold War or just how serious a historical epic it was between two great powers. As the world has changed dramatically over the past 16 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, this book will be an excellent resource to remember just what a huge struggle the Western bloc vs. the Soviet Union and its satellites was. This is not an ideaological book from the Yale professor Gaddis, but he gives credit to the end of the Cold War to three individuals and a people group: Ronald Reagan, Margeret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and the people of eastern Europe who contiually stood up to the Soviet and local communist leaders. A weak point of this book, which admittedly does not have time to explore the vast and complicated expressions of every part of the Cold War is Gaddis explanation for why the anti-war movements of the 1960's and 70's in the West erupted with as much fury as they did, and subsided almost as quickly. His explanation, that it was largely caused by baby boom young adults, coming of age, with lots of time on their hands seems like a short answer. Comparing and contrasting the reaction of the West to the Korean War vs. Vietnam might have made a better use of the text. Gaddis presentation of how the Cold War started at the end of World War II is another excellent section, especially how the West, making practical concessions to the Soviets that they could never hope to bargain for at the end of the war, quickly turned European opinion against the Soviets by forcing the Soviets into the position of being the ones who built wall, established border police and shut themselves off because they had to keep people in. The explanation of proxy conflicts, especially in the Middle East, is another highlight of the work. Seeing the Israeli and Palestinian conflict as rump to the Cold War, and the Soviets inability to deal with their Egyptian allies in Nasser further showed the weakness of the Soviet state. While ultimatley Gaddis presents the end of the Cold War as being led by the four main actors mentioned earlier, his treatment of Gorbachev as a man who managed the end of the failure of the Soviet Empire and the inability of the Soviets to have a sustainable economic future - the very reason for its existence is told with great clarity. Gaddis warns throughout the book that choosing an ends justifying the means approach got the West into more dificulty than anything else. The attempt by the West, especially between John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, to manage a stable world delayed the inevitable end of the Cold War and more than likely created greater human misery of the likes the world has rarely scene. Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher and John Paul, were in a sense revolutionaries, for they sought to win the Cold War by calling for total peace and not half measures of agreements and stability.

The Cold War, by John Lewis Gaddis, is a terrifically researched, footnoted and marvelously written historical account of the Cold War. In the book's preface, Professor Gaddis explains concisely what he set out to do with this project and one, if in doubt about reading this account, should simply read these three plus pages. Gaddis speaks of the need for a "short, comprehensive, and accessible book" on the period that passes the test of his late Yale colleague and historian's litmus test of "So what?". The author answers both needs with aplomb. Gaddis writes on the origins of the Cold War dating beyond the Soviet and United States' respective war aims in the Second World War and into the competing ideologies, both political and economic. He writes on the inevitability of it, the terror, the geopolitics, the blunders. Gaddis misses nothing of consequence. Interestingly, he takes events, sometimes even "failures" in policy and shows the consequences to be quite different than originally interpreted by historians who, Gaddis maintains, might have been hindered by a lens of history too close to the event(s) itself. Certainly an interesting viewpoint. A Cold War should be thought of as required reading for all students of 20th Century geopolitical history. Gaddis is perhaps a bit effacing in his comment that the book is "not a work of original scholarship" but rather a synthesizing narrative of much research already completed. While there is much truth to this, the reality is that Gaddis is the source of a mountain of research and America's leading authority of the period. One might think, quite incorrectly, that he would be the wrong one to pull it all together in a fascinating and readable account. He does a splendid job on all accounts. One could only hope that future historical authors and editors one read this and learn his technique of focusing on "each chapter on a significant theme" rather than a straight chronological report. As a result "they overlap in time and move across space". Quite simply his writing works and produces a very readable and highly interesting account of The Cold War.

This is not a raw, fact-driven historical survey of the Cold War. This is a short and fast description of how the author, a historian at Yale, believed the Cold War developed. There certainly moments of the author showing his opinions, and moreso than an exhaustive history. He bends over backwards to paint a positive imagine of the intentions of Marxism, which is a deeply controversial position given in no small part the millions who have been killed or oppressed in its name. By contrast, Communism and Stalinism are thorough criticized in the book. A great example of this apologetic stance toward Marxism is his assertion that Nikita Khrushchev, a vicious totalitarian dictator, had “humane” Marxist intentions (pg 107). That is an entirely suspect label. The millions in poverty despite decades of Soviet rule under his direction, driven by his ideology, may very well disagree. Another example is stating, like many post war historians from academia, that the mass rapes and ethnic cleansing the Russians committed against the Germans was “in one sense” justifiable due to the German’s actions during the war (pg 99). Excuse me if I fundamentally disagree with any suggestion that mass rape is ever justified in any way shape or form. I expect historians to explain what happens and explain the rational of the actors at the time. The author’s own views on what is “justified” in the author’s perspective is not helpful. Overall, a quick and approachable history. But like most histories from academia, especially of the post war period, it is colored by elements of bias and unnecessary editorializing. Granted, the bias is much less overwhelming and pervasive as many modern writings.

John Lewis Gaddis' "The Cold War: A New History" is an excellent, easily readable, and concise history of the cold war. Gaddis, a professor at Yale and expert on the Cold War, displays his true grasp of this period in history in this work. The Cold War began at the close of World War II as the wartime alliance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. quickly transformed into a competition for security and influence in Europe and soon the rest of the world. Gaddis explains the early years of this struggle as the U.S. and U.S.S.R. entered the nuclear age, struggled to find the boundaries of their rivalry during the Korean War, erection of the Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, and other incidents - all under the threat of an escalation into an unwinnable nuclear war. Then came the détente of the 1970s when the Cold War entered a steady state and apparent permanence, until the failure of communist societies coupled with the "great actors" of the 1980s - Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II - brought about the unexpected end to the Cold War. Gaddis tells this story thematically, focusing on the big picture without getting bogged down into narrative details or spending much time on any once incident. Even the Vietnam War and Afghanistan only merit a couple of pages. This approach is fantastic in keeping the story well under 300 pages, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting to read more about so many of these incidents. Although the book drags somewhat in the middle Gaddis' telling of the climactic 1980s is outstanding. Focusing on the important personalities of Reagan, Thatcher, the Pope, Lech Walesa, and Gorbachev, Gaddis leans much more toward the "great man" theory of history and credits these people with ending the Cold War when most other leaders in the world had accepted the status quo of a continued Cold War - in stark contrast to Stephen Kotkin, who in "Armageddon Averted" blames the Soviet collapse almost entirely on internal problems and dismisses any impact by the Western visionaries and their pressure on the U.S.S.R. However, in addition to crediting the Western visionaries, Gaddis also credits the people of Eastern Europe who seized the opportunities they had, especially in 1989, to push the Eastern Bloc past the point of criticality. As these events fade into history, Gaddis' work does an excellent job placing the Cold War in historical context. This is especially important for those of us who were children of the Cold War, because we need to remember how much the world has changed in our lifetimes. Gaddis has written an excellent book that anyone interested in the history of the 20th century should read.

Gaddis' abbreviated history of the Cold War will stand as a milestone for collapsing the sprawling history of the East vs. West conflict into one readable volume. His real contribution is to put forward a few narrative lines, sometimes overlapping, to give a sense of coherent cause-and-effect progression to the whole. Most of the events were familiar to me, there was little new excavation of archival material, but his insights were helpful at every step. As an economist I was left dissatisfied with his treatment of the failings of the Russian economy, but not because of any inaccuracies or faulty analysis - only because of the brevity and consequent shallow treatment. I have a feeling everyone will react the same way when it comes to their special concerns in the matter - all the attention is on how they fit into the grand narrative, none on the inner workings. Of course, when you think about it, that is absolutely necessary to fit so many aspects in. I learned much about the perspective of Stalin as he tried to balance the goals of security and ideology, and the changing perspectives on nuclear weapons, from sober astonishment on both sides at the beginning to Reagan's naive rejection of the whole business as the Cold War was winding down. This was my main point of disagreement with the author, and points up the main weakness of such a surface treatment - Gaddis cannot really afford to be critical. While he points out the inhumanity of Stalin and Mao, his connection of these to the communist system is glib and he cannot afford to take things deeper. None of the over-arching narratives are carefully justified, and because criticism calls for detailed documention, he mainly avoids it. For me, his take on the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) is, as a result, laughable. He does not confront the evidence that it was destined for failure from the beginning and rightly dismissed by the Russians (he hints that it was taken seriously, but does not engage on the issue). Maybe further developments have overturned this conventional wisdom - Israel is now able to take out a share of the rockets headed for its territory, so maybe the idea was not as crazy as it was found to be when taken down for budget reasons. Gaddis, however, is only able to give the issue a few lines, which are non-committal and, to my eye, glibly tendentious. He takes the position of an admirer of Reagan, notably for being an "actor" whose affable naivete in private encouraged Gorbachev's departure from the paranoid obsessions of the past. That is, to say the least, taking unfair advantage of the benefit of hindsight. It is hard to believe that such a shallow treatment of such important matters will be a landmark, but I believe it will. By stringing matters onto a few narrative lines: security vs. ideology; power facing limitations to the point of being manipulated by client states; central planning running up against its economic limitations; and the need for oppression to enforce totalitarian ideology; Gaddis has set out the overall case to be made that 1) Kennan was right - containment was sufficient and the outcome was thereby inevitable - and 2) nuclear weapons changed everything. Because of classroom treatment everywhere, future contributions will have to take a position vis-a-vis Gaddis' common sense (for the most part) positions on these big themes.

Lo sto leggendo in questi giorni e lo trovo un libro molto interessante. Allo stesso tempo seguendo anche un corso on-line su tale argomento mi risultano chiari altri punti. Consigliato a chi voglia iniziare a capire questo periodo di storia.

Clear, succinct and balanced summary of the Cold War era - stripped of unnecessary length and beautify written. Recommended this to my grown up children and well worth reading again. Brilliant history.

The Book id extraordinary provider of information not available so far . It brings in connections in a very fresh and credible manner. ALL WITHIN few hundred pages !

驚くべき明晰さで時代を総括した名著。これが大学の講義録をまとめたものとは驚きだ。冷戦期を同時代人として生きた評者にとっては、何度読んでも勉強になる。

Análise tosca, desequilibrada e parcial. Carece do mínimo que se exige de um cientista social. Pobre de dados e pleno de crenças preconcebidas. Uma reprodução da propaganda ocidental fantasiada de trabalho científico. Maniqueísta e simplório. Talvez até mal intencionado. Um típico produto da pobreza das ciências políticas dos EUA.