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

Prize-winning study of the global conflict waged during the Cold War and its legacy today.

Odd Arne Westad (Author)

9780521703147, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 February 2007

496 pages, 15 b/w illus. 10 maps
22.8 x 15.4 x 3 cm, 0.8 kg

'Westad's brilliant, bitter account, based on prodigious research, is an indictment of the superpowers. They treated the Third World as their playground and left it devastated.' Martin McCauley

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.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], History of the Americas [HBJK], General & world history [HBG]