The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Cambridge University Press, 10/26/2011
EAN 9780521703147, ISBN10: 052170314X
Paperback, 498 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm
Language: English
The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.
Introduction
1. The empire of liberty
American ideology and foreign interventions
2. The empire of justice
Soviet ideology and foreign interventions
3. The revolutionaries
anti-colonial politics and transformations
4. Creating the Third World
the United States confronts revolution
5. The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges
6. The crisis of decolonization
Southern Africa
7. The prospects of socialism
Ethiopia and the Horn
8. The Islamist defiance
9. The 1980s
the Reagan offensive
10. The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War
Conclusion
Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse.
'This is a genuinely 'international' history ... few genuine research monographs are so wide ranging chronologically and geographically, while also trying to absorb insights from sociology and social anthropology ... taken as a whole no historian has dealt with the links between the Cold War so fully, so broadly and so thoughtfully as Westad in this new account ... a truly seminal work, whose findings will exercise those researching the Cold War for many years.' Reviews in History