Just finished Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace. His central premise is that the time period of 1945 to 1990, known as the Cold War, is typically and falsely thought of as a time of 'peace' between the two superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. While it's true that the two never went directly to war the desire of each to influence events and shape the destinies of other countries led to a great deal of conflict which was then exacerbated by the two of them seeing every regional or civil war as being absolutely critical in the 'grand scheme' of things.
The narrative is in three parts. In the first part, Third World revolutions occur in areas recently freed from colonial domination. He looks especially at China, where a Communist Revolution succeeded under the leadership of Mao Zedong (and others), at Korea, where the two forces first opposed each other in a proxy war, at Vietnam where determined resistance to foreign interference proved decisive and also briefly at Indonesia and Pakistan/Bangla Desh. Part one saw revolutions sparked by Marxism and nationalism triumph (for the most part).
In part two he examines the splintering of any international communist momentum as regional/national interests caused various otherwise aligned parties to fight each other, highlighted by the 'Sino-Soviet split.'
Part three takes us to the Middle East where revolutions erupted based not on the Capitalism vs. Communism clash but with millions of people rallying around ethnic and religious ties. As before though, the two superpowers picked sides and vied for influence creating uneasy alliances, sometimes with recent adversaries.
At the end of the 80's the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States as the winner of the Cold War. But what had they won?
