The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times Paperback – October 26, 2011

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.

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005)This is a compelling and controversial reexamination of the global conflict waged by the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War and the part it played in shaping Africa, Asia and Latin America today. Arne Westad examines the origins and course of Third World revolutions and the ideologies that drove the United States and Soviet Union towards interventionism. He argues that the real lasting legacy of the Cold War are the ideologies, movements and states which interventionism has fuelled and which increasingly dominate international affairs today. -Publisher's Book Description"Odd Arne Westad's new book is an extremely important contribution to the historiography of the Cold War. With broad erudition, amazing geographical range, and inventive research in archives around the globe, Westad tells the tragic story of the United States and Soviet Union's involvement in what became called the 'Third World.' The newly emerging nations of the 'South' - of Africa, Asia, and Latin America - barely emerged from their humiliating subservience to European colonialism before being dragged by Cold War rivalries into ideologically-inspired upheavals that ended up bankrupting their countries and devastating their peoples. Westad's study enables his readers to integrate the Third World into the history of the Cold War and confronts them with the meaning of intervention in the past for the international system today."-Norman M. Naimark, Stanford UniversityEurope, where I - like the author - grew up during the Cold War, is hardly ever mentioned in this book except at the very beginning. Europe is where it all started, after World War II, but it is actually going back to the German-Russian Sonderfrieden of Brest-Litovsk in 1917. Europe, with a land boundary going through its geographic middle, however, would have been the territory where an atomic land war would have been fought, the Soviets entering by the Fulda Gap in Germany ...While this kept us scared well enough, the interventions and the confrontations, starting with the Soviet-triggered Berlin Blockade in 1948, while geographically localized, went global: Korea, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Vietnam, The Congo, Somalia, Angola to name but a few of the major ones, not forgetting Afghanistan and Irak. Interventions typically made a mess of things locally, hardly ever achieving anything positive in and for the countries it was meant to keep or get into one's orbit.The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has ended the Cold War. We have had enough experience since to doubt that what emerges is very promising: To me, accelerated global migration on an unpreceded scale, militant Islam and China are the three major question marks.obus6 - Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War - 1/8/2012

Westas has a simple argument to make and plenty of fascinating historical material with which to make it - that the two Cold War superpowers basically ruined the Third World through their heavy handed and amoral (if not immoral) machinations. Taking a tour from Central America through Africa and Asia, he factually illustrates each sequence of events by which ideological and practical considerations collapsed a society (or kept it in a collapsed state). Excellent factually.That said, the prose is turgid and the argument doesn’t come out until the very end of the book so while it wins a Bancroft prize for its tale for practitioners, it lacks the story telling that make it an entertaining read for others.

The Global Cold War is an interesting study of the Cold War which focuses on the conflict outside of Berlin and the rest of Europe. This book really clarifies just how Cold War strategies impacted Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other places. It is written more like a college level text book rather than a popular history and it is great for anyone interested in how the Cold War altered Global Politics.

for a history class. Interesting if you like that sort of thing although insight is always good to have so you can be a productive citizen

From reading Westad's book it appears that the American loss in Vietnam actually led to the Soviets losing the Cold War. After the American defeat in Vietnam, the Soviets believed that they could ignore the popular front strategy that they used in Spain during the thirties and continued in Egypt and Indonesia, and replace it with a more revolutionary strategy that would abandon the popular front phase. This was the main reason they supported the revolutionary governments in Angola and Ethiopia. However wars in these African countries and Central America drained the Soviet economy. Finally the Soviets believed that they could prevent Afghanastan from falling to the competing revolutionary ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. Ths further led to financial and human losses for the Soviet Union and finally its collaspse. It is ironic after the Soviet loss in the Cold War the Americans find themselves blinded by triumphalism and committing serious mistakes in the Middle East and Latin America.