Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 720 pp., $35.00.

IN 2005, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis released his book, The Cold War: A New History. Glowing reviews of the book followed in the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. Among the few dissenters was Tony Judt, a New York University historian who died in 2010. Judt had opposed the Iraq War, when so many other intellectuals—including Gaddis—joined in the delusions that George W. Bush could, should and would democratize the Middle East. By 2005, those fantasies were discredited by events in Mesopotamia (though Gaddis was unchastened, arguing in the American Interest as late as 2008 that the senior goal of American foreign policy should be “ending tyranny”).

In the New York Review of Books, Judt argued that “John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of America’s cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers.” However brilliant his works had been during the Cold War, Gaddis became an American triumphalist once the Berlin Wall collapsed. He had comparatively little understanding of the Soviet experience and, most egregiously, didn’t seem to care much about the enormous damage both superpowers inflicted on what was then called the Third World. The result, Judt argued, was that the Cold War was “a story still to be told.”

With Odd Arne Westad’s new book, the story is now told. Westad is the coauthor of several books on the Cold War, as well as coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. He also wrote The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, which won the Bancroft Prize. As its title indicates, The Global Cold War suggested that the Cold War was very much a globe-spanning conflict, migrating into areas far beyond the borders of the two superpowers.

His new book integrates that focus on the developing world with a more traditional emphasis on the great powers. It is aimed at a general rather than a scholarly audience, with far fewer footnotes or archival research than his previous works (more on that later). The Cold War: A World History is told chronologically, but unlike most books on the subject, it begins with the right period.

THE FIRST well-regarded book on the war written from a post–Berlin Wall perspective was Martin Walker’s Cold War, published in 1994. Like so many others to come, it began with the dissension in the Allied ranks in the closing years of World War II. By beginning with an earlier period, Westad advances beyond that approach. He is able to devote some attention to the ideological sources of the struggle, which began with Lenin’s interpretation of communism, prioritizing global revolution and antagonism toward the noncommunist world. “The Cold War was born from the global transformations of the late nineteenth century and was buried as a result of tremendously rapid changes a hundred years later,” he writes. Those changes include decolonization, the ascension of the United States to world power and the gradual decline of scientific socialism, as well as the two world wars. “The Great War jumpstarted the destinies of the two future Cold War Superpowers. It made the United States the global embodiment of capitalism and it made Russia a Soviet Union, a permanent challenge to the capitalist world.” Westad also makes the thought-provoking claim, rather unusual in a book on the Cold War, that

it is therefore quite possible that the Cold War will be reduced in significance by future historians, who from their vantage point will attach more significance to the origins of Asian economic power, or the beginning of space exploration, or the eradication of smallpox.

Westad proceeds from there through all the stops along the way to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Separate chapters examine India, China, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as summaries of Richard Nixon’s diplomacy and the reigns of Kennedy, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. That he manages to do all this in largely sequential fashion is doubly impressive.

The Cold War evinces a lifetime of research and thought on the subject. Compelling ideas and valuable insights appear frequently, such as: “In spite of their attractiveness on a global scale, neither the Soviet nor the US system was ever fully replicated elsewhere.” Or the explanation for communism’s appeal in Vietnam: “One reason, ironically, was the integration of Vietnamese elites into French culture and education, from whence the post-1914 generation took over the radicalization that was prevalent among French youth, too.” Or: “In Asia as in Europe, US policy in the early Cold War was more oriented toward the expansion of capitalism as such than toward a unique preservation of US national economic advantage or the interests of specific US companies.”

Westad’s assessment is that some sort of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable once the common foe of Nazi Germany was extinguished. “Leaders of the two countries had seen each other as adversaries ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917, and in some cases even before that,” he writes. Illustrative of his measured approach throughout the book, Westad assigns blame for the conflict to both parties, though not so much that he is unable to make moral distinctions. Stalin’s determination to establish control in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, contributed greatly to the breakdown of good relations with Britain and the United States. But, he writes, “it was containment that made postwar conflict into a Cold War.” The United States was unwilling to grant the Soviets a traditional sphere of influence, let alone see them as a comparable power deserving of commensurate respect. Seen from 2017, it might seem absurd that so many Europeans, even in England, looked upon the Soviet Union with admiration and gratitude. But, however much Americans like to forget it, it was the Red Army that “tore the guts out of the German military machine,” in Winston Churchill’s colorful phrase.

Westad faults Truman for being unwilling or unable to extend Franklin Roosevelt’s friendly policy toward the USSR. Stalin might have hunkered down and developed foreign-policy paranoia regardless of Truman’s behavior, he concedes. “But the intensity of the conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had been made by the stronger power to entice Moscow toward forms of cooperation.” This is somewhat unfair to Truman. The day he was sworn in as president after Roosevelt’s death, Truman said in a statement he intended “to carry on as he believed the President would have done.” There is little reason to doubt his sincerity. In From Roosevelt to Truman, University of Notre Dame professor Wilson Miscamble credibly argued that Truman began his presidency with open-mindedness toward the Soviets but was convinced by events that cooperation was impossible. He wasn’t alone.

ASIA, MEANWHILE, experienced rapid decolonization. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were resolutely opposed to traditional European imperialism, however much they acted as imperialist powers in their own regions. Combined with the destitution of the former colonial powers, this meant that Asian nations were freer to pursue their own destinies. Of course, in Japan and Korea, those destinies were determined by their occupiers, who molded these societies in their own images. It is a sign of Westad’s attentiveness to facts that, without ever succumbing to anything resembling American chauvinism, he can write something as direct as: “The Korean War came from Stalin’s change of mind. If he had not given the go-ahead to Kim, there would have been no war.”

Westad betrays no romanticism toward the Soviet Union or its communist admirers—that might seem like a low bar, but there are still scholars like Bruce Cumings who look fondly on the Marxist regimes—but the book makes the clear-eyed observation,

Only by industrializing fast could a country become socialist and modern. The policy had an obvious appeal: in countries on the European periphery, where there was a profound sense of having fallen behind, and in countries outside of Europe, such as China, Korea, and Vietnam, rapid industrialization seemed indeed to be the way forward.

Westad might have added that the Soviet Communist Party’s untouchable command of power was similarly appealing to political leaders and intellectuals worldwide.

Immediately prior to The Cold War, Westad’s latest book was a study of China’s foreign policy since 1750. His mastery of the subject is evident in a chapter called “China’s Scourge.” It is valuable not only for a discussion of how the Chinese Communist Party managed to win the civil war against the Nationalists, but also for a succinct reminder of why and how swiftly relations dissolved between the CCP and the Soviets. “The Soviet assistance program for China was not only the biggest Moscow ever undertook outside its own borders,” Westad writes. “It was also, in relative terms, the biggest such program undertaken by any country anywhere, including the US Marshall Plan for Europe.” Within a decade following this generosity, they almost fought a nuclear war.

Similarly incisive here is a chapter on India. Often neglected in general histories of the Cold War, India was for a while the leader of the Non-Aligned nations. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was progressive, but intent on keeping his newly independent country truly independent. This, of course, infuriated the Americans, for whom any friendliness with the USSR was interpreted as hostility to them. And yet, when India’s moral purity conflicted with its conflict with China, nationalism prevailed, leading to a brief war. “In spite of its many efforts, even a country as a significant as India was never able to fully break away from the global conflict molding its policies,” Westad concludes.

WESTAD ALSO wrote a book on the fall of détente, for which he distinctly blames Americans. “Nixon and Kissinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept,” he writes. “Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever.” This is where Gaddis’s immersion in American documents might have been helpful. Most Americans, at least on the anti-détente side, were worried not that the Soviet Union was at parity with the United States, but that it had actually exceeded America’s capabilities. However wrongheaded and overly alarmist that perspective was, its importance in explaining American behavior should not be overlooked.

Indeed, Westad’s decision to reduce the research shown to the readers in this book makes some of his unorthodox judgments difficult to credit. Most conspicuously, Westad assesses Dwight Eisenhower harshly, but without offering enough support for his claims. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the evaluation of Ike was decidedly mixed. He was too complacent, it was said, too moderate and timid. He favored a strategic posture built around nuclear weapons that led to an arms race. He failed to confront Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism. He initiated the first of many ill-considered CIA interventions in foreign countries, in Guatemala and Iran. And he added a religious dimension to the Cold War, which elevated the conflict beyond the already-dangerous levels that existed when he took power in 1953.

That perception gave way in the 1980s to a consideration that Eisenhower was not complacent, but subtle. The opening of archives in the 1970s convinced many that his was, as the political scientist Fred Greenstein put it in his 1982 book of the same name, “the hidden-hand presidency.” The popular historian Stephen Ambrose did much to further this view, first in 1981’s Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, and then in a biography, released in two volumes in 1983 and 1984. (Writing in the New Republic in 2006, the journalist John Judis observed that Ambrose’s books “changed many a liberal’s view of the general,” counting himself among them.)

The revisionist view of Eisenhower has now become orthodoxy. He routinely numbers among historians’ rankings of the top ten presidents. Far from sharing the contemporary perception of him as popular but ineffectual—“It’s just like Eisenhower. The worse I do, the more popular I get,” JFK said after the Bay of Pigs disaster—we like Ike as much as the people who wore his campaign buttons. Celebrity architect Frank Gehry designed an Eisenhower memorial that Congress has funded to the tune of $100 million, to sit across from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, on Washington’s Independence Avenue.

Most scholars lean toward the view that Ike was a first-rate Cold War strategist. He balanced the budget thrice, halting the unsustainable economic and military buildup that resulted from the Korean War. He set diplomatic precedents by meeting with Soviet leaders and organizing purposeful summits. And he outflanked domestic hysteria, establishing a bipartisan commitment to a strategy of containment. Predominant is the view expressed by Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman in their book, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped a Cold War Strategy:

Later events . . . have enhanced appreciation of his prudent and sober judgment. In a turbulent and dangerous stage of East-West relations, with an untested and erratic Soviet leadership and a changing strategic environment, Eisenhower managed a succession of crises and set a course that preserved both security and peace.

Westad will have none of it. “Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine,” he writes. “On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. . . . The turn toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed unimaginable.” Pages later, he adds,

If the president was not a Cold War hysteric, neither was he someone who could conceive of a world without the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower lacked the imagination and political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin’s death.

This is a provocative portrayal of Eisenhower, a welcome antidote to the revisionism that can approach hagiography. But it is undercut by Westad’s slight documentation.

Cold War triumphalism has had pernicious effects on American foreign policy. A straight line can be drawn from the idea that Ronald Reagan’s military buildup and assertive rhetoric ended the Cold War to the fantasy that the United States could rebuild the Middle East. The prominence of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration was due largely to the widespread belief that they had been right in seeing the transformative potential of American power during the Cold War. Though Donald Trump was able, in the Republican primaries in 2016, to counter delusions of American omnipotence with delusions of American seclusion, the messianic streak still runs strong in the Republican Party and in segments of the Democratic Party. Its absence in current political debates should be seen as temporary. When it inevitably arises again, trouble will ensue. “We all lost the cold war,” Gorbachev once said. The difficulty arises when one party thinks it won.

Jordan Michael Smith is the author of the Kindle single Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the Post-Presidency.

Image: President Eisenhower visits with Republic of China President Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang in Taipei, Taiwan. June 1960. Also pictured is US Ambassador to Republic of China Everett Drumright​