Cambridge University Press
9780521853644 - The Global Cold War - Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times - by Odd Arne Westad
Frontmatter/Prelims

The Global Cold War

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, this book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.

ODD ARNE WESTAD is Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he teaches Cold War history and the history of East Asia. He has written or edited ten books on contemporary international history, the most recent of which are Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (2003) and, with Jussi Hanhimäki, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (2003).

The Global Cold War

Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

Odd Arne Westad

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2005
First paperback edition 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

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ISBN-13 978-0-521-85364-4 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-70314-7 paperback

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For
Ruth First
and
Sayed Ali Majrooh

	List of illustrations	page viii
	List of maps	ix
	Acknowledgments	x
	List of abbreviations	xii
	Introduction	1
1	The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions	8
2	The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions	39
3	The revolutionaries: anticolonial politics and transformations	73
4	Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution	110
5	The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges	158
6	The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa	207
7	The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn	250
8	The Islamist defiance: Iran and Afghanistan	288
9	The 1980s: the Reagan offensive	331
10	The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War	364
	Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions, and great power collapse	396
	Notes	408
	Index	471

Illustrations

1.	Bolshevik soldiers in 1917. © Bettmann/CORBIS	page 47
2.	Sukarno addressing supporters in 1950 © Bettmann/CORBIS	84
3.	Kennedy and Mobutu at the White House in 1963. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS	141
4.	Mikoyan with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Havana, 1960. © Bettmann/CORBIS.	174
5.	Che Guevara in Zaire (Congo), probably June 1965.	179
6.	Poster: “25 de septembro 1975”	219
7.	MPLA supporters in Luanda, 1975. © Françoise de Mulder/CORBIS	221
8.	Poster: “25 de junho de 1976: Um ano de independencia”	223
9.	Mengistu Haile Mariam. © Bettmann/CORBIS	252
10.	Propaganda pictures distributed by the Afghan resistance on the back of matchboxes, 1983–85.	317
11.	Propaganda pictures distributed by the Afghan resistance on the back of matchboxes, 1983–85.	327
12.	Jimmy Carter and Daniel Ortega in Washington in 1979. © Bettmann/CORBIS	332
13.	Ronald Reagan meeting with Afghan Mujahedin in the Oval Office, 1983. © Bettmann/CORBIS	333
14.	General Boris Gromov waving to withdrawing Russian troops, Afghanistan, 1989. © Reuters/CORBIS	373
15.	“Botha, I’m fed up.” South African anticonscription poster against the war in Angola, 1988.	391

Maps

1.	The contiguous continental expansion of the United States up to 1914	page 13
2.	The Russian empire in 1914	44–45
3.	Decolonisation since 1945	88
4.	US Third World interventions, 1945–65	116
5.	The United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba	173
6.	The US war in Indochina, 1960s	182
7.	The wars in Southern Africa	229
8.	The Ethiopian revolution and the Ogaden war	258
9.	The Soviet Union in Afghanistan	314
10.	The Nicaraguan revolution and the Contra war	342

Acknowledgments

A book that aims to integrate more than fifty years of the international history of five continents obviously works up a fair amount of debts, intellectual or otherwise. My primary debt is to those many scholars who have written accounts of various aspects of the Cold War in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that I have drawn on for this volume. They have created a big literature, spread over many different fields of investigation, from history to sociology and social anthropology. Each of these fields are fascinating in their own right, and I have written this book in the spirit of helping to connect them further.

Another debt is to the members of my graduate seminar at the LSE over the past four years, especially Alita Byrd, Jeffrey Byrne, Jan Cornelius, Tanya Harmer, Julia Huber, Alex Martinos, Alessandra Migliaccio, David Milne, Claudia Schleipen, Sim Chi-yin, Candace Sobers, Amal Tarhuni, David Walsh, Valdis Wish, Louise Woodroofe, and Cynthia Wu. They and their cohorts made for many good discussions and much good cheer while helping to shape this book.

I am also deeply indebted to those scholars who agreed to read the whole or part of the manuscript as it was being prepared. My coeditor of the Cambridge History of the Cold War, Melvyn Leffler, is a wonderful critic and a great friend, whose reading influenced the manuscript in many different ways (although I think we still disagree on its basic argument). At LSE my colleagues McGregor Knox, Piers Ludlow, Nigel Ashton, and Steven Casey provided important input. During my stay at New York University in the spring of 2002, Marilyn Young read and commented on the first chapter. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Fred Logevall (now of Cornell University) helped organize a seminar to discuss my main findings in the spring of 2003, and Campbell Craig did the same at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. At Peking University in the spring of 2004 Niu Jun and his colleagues helped make this a better book, and in Moscow Aleksandr Chubarian and his staff at the Institute of General