The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

by Odd Arne Westad

• ISBN13: 9780521703147
• ISBN10: 052170314X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions

The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions

The revolutionaries: anti-colonial politics and transformations

Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution

The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges

The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa

The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn

The Islamist defiance

The 1980s: the Reagan offensive

The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War

Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse

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