Westad Cold War the Cold

Westad Cold War

The Cold War According to Westad

When World War II ended, international leaders were faced with the difficult new task of dividing the spoils. With the fall of the Axis powers, two significant allied forces were left standing, in the United States and the Soviet Union. It wasn't long, then, before the strategic allies were in conflict over the appropriate allotment of global properties. More importantly, at least to the outcome of world ideology, was the newly defined distinction between democracy and communism. In extension, and with the aid of much propaganda on both sides, it was the friction between freedom and order, between prosperity and unity, between capitalism and socialism. So essentially, as we left the destruction and atrocity of WWII, we entered the anxiety and mistrust of the Cold War. Odd Arne Westad's the Global Cold War, is an account of the American and Soviet strategic policies that governed global diplomatic and military behaviors over the Cold War's tumultuous duration. Its primary focus is on the many states and nations on the periphery of this conflict which were directly impacted.

As the Cold War pitted two superpowers against one another, each proceeded with a promise of its practical and principled superiority, even as it informed its people and those throughout the world that its foil was a dangerous rogue force. Westad notes that this is a degree of moral relativism with little relevance to the political processes there occurring. To this extent, in Chapter 2, Westad's focus is on the Soviet philosophical disposition, which though it was the antithetical force to that of America's on the global scheme, was seeded by the same principals. Namely, "like the United States, the Soviet state was founded on ideas and plans for the betterment of humanity, rather than on concepts of identity and nation. Both were envisaged by their founders to be grand experiments, on the success of which the future of humankind depended." (Westad, 39) and, with the power of the Soviet Union itself extremely formidable, many of the wars which the United States would fight during the Cold War could not have been considered imperialist in nature. The notion of subjugating weaker nation-states in the interests of a grand-scale geographical powerhouse is one which was tempered by an ongoing Russian resistance. Such is to say that American invasions during that time in nations such as Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea can be characterized as the engagement of a single and equal enemy in a multitude of theatres.

This process of facing off against one another -- always in a location far from the seats of power in Moscow and Washington -- would create many victims across half a century. To this end, in the third chapter of our text, Westad draws some important historical parallels between the era of colonialism and the Cold War. Both of these, according to the premise put forth by this text, relied on the measures of imperial occupation and the dominance of indigenous peoples in order to persist. And in both instances, the result would be continuous and problematic tumult within occupied locals. As Westad denotes, "in spite of the vigorous defense put up in many Third World areas, it often took decades after the attacks before the victims were able to organize comprehensive resistance to colonial rule." (Westad, 73) Indeed, in the following chapter, Westad will go on to elaborate the manner in which numerous aspects of this Cold War approach would actually help to stimulate the opposite impact of that which had been claimed by the nation-building philosophy. Namely, as both the United States and the Soviet Union claimed to offer a chance at advancement in foreign locales, strife and exploitation -- brought on by imperial occupation -- would help to incite greater gaps of living standard and government in such nations.

This is because, as Westad argues centrally in Chapter 4, "in the aftermath of World War II the United States intervened repeatedly to influence the processes of change that were taking place throughout the Third World." (Westad, 110) Indeed, the presumption that the colonial exploitation of the previous centuries had led to the horrible breakdown of civilization that manifested as World War II had led many Cold War enthusiasts in the United States to believe that America truly did offer a superior moral and structural grounding that could be employed to the rescue of disenfranchised people throughout the world. Though our historical reflection allows us to resolve that this approach had a great deal in common with colonialism in terms of the self-interested foreign rule which it often brought to occupied locales, the belief for its supporters at the time was that nation-building was a new and morally-superior approach to the issue of advancing the Third World.

Several of the more historically prominent moments of tumult to be sparked by the Cold War held to suggest in retrospect that moral differentiation between colonialism and nation-building is baseless. Indeed, the victims of both American and Russian occupation would suffer immensely, experiencing the regression and devastation of foreign aggression and war with little means for self-directed defense. In Chapter 5, the author calls to conversation the issues of Cuba and Vietnam, both of which would find themselves of geographical relevance to the philosophical and strategic positioning of opposing worldviews. Outcomes would include the standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- which to date represents perhaps the closest that we as a global community have come since World War II to deploying nuclear weaponry -- and the quagmire of Vietnam, which is a war that clearly produced no victors. In both instances, it would become quite clear that the ambitions of the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. would spill out into the sometimes divergent interests of puppet states. Westad notes that 'revolutionary states,' such as "Cuba and Vietnam challenged not only Washington in defense of their revolutions; they also challenged the course set by the Soviet Union for the development of socialism and for Communist interventions abroad." (Westad, 158) This is to indicate that one of the core failures in the premise of Cold War nation-building would be in this idea that the independent wills of nations could be molded by outsiders. Resistance to the pressures from both sides would produce forces in Cuba and Vietnam that would persist independently, with the socialist leadership of the former, for instance, persisting two decades past the collapse of the Soviet Union.