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Ian Roxborough, Odd Arne Westad. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 484. $35.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 112, Issue 3, June 2007, Pages 806–808, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.112.3.806
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Odd Arne Westad has presented us with a major revision in the historiography of the Cold War. His book has already generated debate in, for example, the pages of Cold War History. His central claim is that “the most important aspects of the Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centered, but connected to political and social developments in the Third World” (p. 396). This is a position with which many, including the present reviewer, will have a great deal of sympathy. It is, however, a more complicated and problematic proposition than it might, at first sight, seem.
The author takes us on a tour through the hot spots of the Cold War. These are largely to be found in the underdeveloped regions of the world. Westad does a marvelous job in integrating a mass of material in many languages dealing with a vast range of conflicts around the Third World. Here is the chief merit of the book and the reason why it is an important landmark in Cold War history. Nowhere else has the intricate story of how and why the superpowers and their allies intervened in Angola, Congo, Yemen, Vietnam, Somalia, Central America, and Iran been told so convincingly and with such command of the sources.
