Westad is best known for a brilliant, prize-winning book, The Global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times (2005). Its searing account of the Cold War’s hot wars was coloured by his own experiences in Africa and Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his sympathies were engaged by courageous struggles to resist foreign interventions and to remedy colonial legacies of injustice and inequality. Constructed on a research base of such geographic and linguistic breadth that it should qualify for a world record, the book argued that superpower interventions in the Third World turned decolonisation into a kind of re-colonisation.

As European empires unravelled after World War II, newly independent countries were drawn into the orbits of one or the other of the superpowers, replacing one form of domination with another. Westad found but one major distinction between imperialism and Cold War interventionism: in the former, a civilising mission was ‘almost an afterthought’, whereas the Soviets and the Americans were both genuinely convinced from the beginning that their meddling would improve the world.

In this even more ambitious book, Westad returns to these themes but extends his chronological coverage to the twentieth century and his geographic sweep to the entire world. In 629 pages of lucid prose, he offers an exceedingly detailed and prodigiously researched account of an ideologically driven conflict that touched everyone alive, if only because of the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. His account begins not in 1947, the usual marker of the onset of the Cold War, nor even in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. He opens instead with the first crisis of global capitalism in the 1890s, to underscore his argument that the Cold War arose from economic, social, and political transformations that date from the nineteenth century. From there, the story moves forward to chart the contest between capitalism and communism across the next century, encompassing both the familiar – the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan – and the lesser known: the Lomé Conventions, India’s role in the Congo crisis, Trotskyist parties in Europe. More than eighty countries are listed in the index.

John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, 1961 (John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Wikimedia Commons)

Befitting a historian of the world who is also a China specialist, Westad offers superb coverage of events in Asia. The twenty-page chapter on the Korean War, which Westad singles out as perhaps the Cold War’s single greatest calamity, offers an exceptionally well-crafted synopsis. Using Soviet and Chinese archival sources and recent scholarship, Westad deftly reconstructs the miscalculations that led Stalin to acquiesce in Kim Il-Sung’s plot to reunify the Korean peninsula by force. Frustrated in Europe, emboldened by the success of the Chinese Revolution, lulled by mixed signals from the United States about its commitment to South Korea, but most of all caught up in delusions of omniscience, Stalin at last approved a risky move that he had previously forbidden. Mao, though worried about foreign intervention, had no choice but to go along.

Kim and Stalin were wrong. When US-led UN forces intervened after North Korea’s invasion of the South, Mao was forced to send a million Chinese troops to stave off its communist ally’s defeat. US General Douglas MacArthur publicly called for war against the PRC itself; the Truman administration privately debated the nuclear option. By the time Stalin’s death in 1953 finally provided an opening for a negotiated settlement, Korea was a ‘wasteland’ of ‘death and despair’. Three and a half million Koreans had died or been wounded, and the country was in ruins. Westad is unsparing in his assessment of what he calls an entirely avoidable, barbaric, and catastrophic war.

Its reverberations were global. It fomented McCarthyist hysteria in the United States, bonded the Chinese to the Soviets (temporarily), hardened a Sino-American hostility that would endure for decades, escalated nuclear fears around the globe, and accelerated the race to build nuclear arsenals that could destroy the world. Above all, it cemented the notion that the Cold War was a zero-sum game, in which no side could afford to ‘lose’ any inch of territory and military options were always on the table.

The assumptions that the Korean War set in place shaped much of the rest of the Cold War, as the superpowers battled for influence from Angola to Zaire. Westad deftly surveys every major crisis and many minor events that constituted or were shaped by the Cold War. The saga ends on 25 December 1991 when Gorbachev handed the nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin, the new leader of new Russia, and the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.

Westad amply proves his point that, although the Cold War did not determine every development between 1945 and 1991, it acted like a black hole in international affairs, its gravitational force distorting the orbits of even the most distant objects.

If the book has a flaw, it is that, despite the author’s admirable thoroughness and indisputable brilliance, at times he exerts too little gravitational force over his own narrative. It will be a priceless reference work for scholars and devotees of Cold War history, but general readers may sometimes falter over the preponderance of detail. As Cicero observed, ‘the causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves’. Westad’s explanations of ‘why’ are often too bland, too brief, and too even-handed to offer the reader a foothold in the sheer mass of information. Soviet leaders made mistakes. American leaders made mistakes. Third World leaders made mistakes. The reader strains to make sense of decades of conflicts without sharply drawn guides as to where responsibility lies. The book can sometimes feel rather like a movie in need of a soundtrack: it underplays the cues that tell the reader how to understand not just the sequence of events but their underlying meaning.

Odd Arne Westad

Mao, for example, is arguably the worst mass killer in a century riddled with mass murderers. In the figure Westad cites, forty million Chinese died from starvation and overwork in the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which was followed by the madness of the Cultural Revolution – mass torture, murder, and mind-boggling disruption to the country’s functioning. After establishing what Mao knew, ordered, and encouraged, Westad concludes that ‘Mao’s preoccupation with ethos over practical gain ... had led the revolution astray’. A preoccupation led China astray? Historians should not don the robes of judges, but they can be clear about who did what and pen words that match the deeds described.

Even so, Westad has written an indispensable guide to the world today, which, nearly three decades after Gorbachev’s downfall, is still shaped by what happened during the Cold War. We need look no further than North Korea, where the Kim dynasty still threatens aggression on a peninsula divided along Cold War lines. Westad agrees that the United States ‘won’ the Cold War, but at unnecessarily high costs, both at home and abroad. The bills are still due. The old habits that American leaders refused to shed, along with the hubris borne of Cold War triumphalism, led them into mistaken wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Misguided thinking may yet lead to another.