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

Odd Arne Westad argues that the most consequential dimensions of the Cold War, the period of US-Soviet global conflict from roughly 1945 to 1991, were not military standoffs in Europe but the political and social upheavals in the Third World, meaning the former colonial or semicolonial countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America subject to European economic or political domination. The book traces how interventionist ideologies developed within Washington and Moscow, how revolutionary movements interacted with those ideologies, and how the resulting confrontations left lasting scars on the regions caught in between.

The first three chapters establish the ideological roots of superpower interventionism. Westad traces American interventionist thinking back to the eighteenth century, arguing that core ideas about liberty, private property, science, and the capitalist market formed a durable ideology linking the country's founding principles to its twentieth-century foreign policy. From continental expansion and the subjugation of Native Americans to the restructuring of occupied Japan after World War II, the United States developed a pattern of reforming other societies in its own image. By the early Cold War, modernization theorists such as Walt Rostow, an economist and policy adviser, supplied a framework that cast American-style development as universal and positioned the Soviet alternative as its mortal rival.

Soviet ideology followed a parallel but distinct trajectory. The Bolsheviks, the revolutionary Communist movement that seized power in Russia in 1917, inherited a vast multiethnic empire and attempted to transform it through collective modernity directed by a Communist Party vanguard. Under Joseph Stalin, a dogmatic insistence that countries must pass through fixed stages of development constrained Moscow's engagement with anticolonial movements. Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev opened a new phase by courting newly independent states and declaring that the era of Third World participation in world affairs had arrived, though the catastrophic split with Communist China in the early 1960s undercut much of Moscow's ambition.

The book's treatment of Third World revolutionary movements emphasizes their diversity. European colonialism, which by 1920 had placed more than 450 million people under direct rule, generated two broad currents of resistance: Marxist movements seeking rapid social transformation on the Soviet model, and nativist movements drawing on indigenous traditions to envision modern but culturally autonomous states. Leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Sukarno in Indonesia tried to chart independent paths at gatherings like the 1955 Bandung conference, where representatives of 1.5 billion people articulated principles of nonalignment. Yet the optimism of Bandung eroded as development stalled, military coups toppled civilian governments, and a new generation turned toward Marxism-Leninism for its structured approach to state building.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine how US interventions helped create the Third World as a political entity and how Cuba and Vietnam challenged both superpowers. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organized the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 and Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, establishing covert regime change as a standard tool. The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Washington forced Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt, marked the moment America replaced the European colonial powers as the dominant Western force in the Third World. In the Congo, the US orchestrated the removal of elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and backed the Mobutu dictatorship, while in Latin America, coups in Brazil and an invasion of the Dominican Republic followed similar patterns of preventing leftist governments from taking root.

Cuba's 1959 revolution under Fidel Castro and Vietnam's prolonged war became the two most potent challenges to the Cold War order. Castro's defiance of Washington and his willingness to send soldiers to Africa inspired revolutionary movements worldwide, while Ho Chi Minh's Communist-led forces demonstrated that a determined guerrilla movement could outlast American military power. The Sino-Soviet split created further space for independent revolutionary movements, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's claim to theoretical authority gave Third World leaders room to maneuver between the two Communist centers. Within the Soviet Union, a new generation of advisers began arguing from the late 1960s for more activist Third World engagement, citing the structural crisis of US power and growing Soviet military capabilities for long-distance intervention.

The book's central chapters cover the peak of superpower confrontation during the 1970s and early 1980s. In Angola, where three liberation movements fought for control after Portugal's 1974 revolution ended its colonial empire, the Soviet Union and Cuba mounted a massive intervention to install the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in power, airlifting more than 12,000 Cuban troops and vast quantities of weapons. South Africa's invasion on behalf of rival movements, combined with a covert CIA operation, collapsed after the US Senate cut funding. Moscow interpreted the victory as proof that it could project power globally during détente, the period of reduced US-Soviet tension.

In Ethiopia, military unrest in 1974 produced the Derg, a coordinating committee of noncommissioned officers that set the country on a radical Marxist course under Mengistu Haile Mariam. Moscow committed more than $1 billion in arms and nearly 1,000 military personnel to help Ethiopia defeat a Somali invasion of the disputed Ogaden region in 1977-78, the largest Soviet-led campaign outside Eastern Europe since the Korean War. The aftermath proved disillusioning: Mengistu resisted Soviet advice on party building and national reconciliation, while his regime's intensified social transformation and forced intensive farming contributed to a devastating 1984 famine.

The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 introduced a new force into Third World politics. Islamism, a political ideology calling for the incorporation of Islamic law into state foundations, offered an alternative rooted in the Third World itself, condemning both superpowers as enemies of the faithful. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced the US-allied shah with an Islamic republic. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, undertaken to install a more cooperative Communist leader, compounded the crisis. What Moscow expected to be a brief operation became a decade-long war against Islamist guerrillas, the Mujahedin, who received massive support from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The invasion galvanized the Muslim world and delegitimized the Left, making Islamist agitation more potent across the region.

The final chapters trace the Reagan administration's offensive and the Gorbachev leadership's withdrawal. President Ronald Reagan combined covert wars in Nicaragua and Angola, aggressive support for the Afghan Mujahedin, and economic pressure through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to roll back Soviet influence. In Nicaragua, where the leftist Sandinista revolutionary movement had taken power in 1979, the CIA armed a counterrevolutionary force of over 15,000 fighters, while in Afghanistan, CIA Director William Casey orchestrated a dramatic escalation of support, including the supply of advanced Stinger ground-to-air missiles that shifted the military balance. Reagan's economic warfare also operated through structural adjustment programs that required market-oriented reforms as conditions for international assistance, pushing most Third World countries away from state-led development.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985, initially tried to invigorate Moscow's Third World commitments, but the war in Afghanistan and the failures of allied regimes convinced him that withdrawal was necessary. A 1986 civil war in Soviet-allied South Yemen deepened his disillusionment. By 1987, Gorbachev set a firm deadline for leaving Afghanistan, and the last Soviet soldiers crossed the border in February 1989. The broader retreat followed: The Sandinistas lost elections in Nicaragua in 1990, Mengistu's regime collapsed in Ethiopia in 1991, and negotiations in Southern Africa produced Namibian independence and helped set the stage for the end of apartheid.

The book concludes that the Cold War in the Third World was a continuation of European colonialism through different means, with both superpowers imposing large-scale, state-led projects to remake societies on populations ill-equipped to absorb them. The Soviet Union collapsed in part because its Third World allies became mirrors reflecting the failures of its own system. The United States emerged triumphant but left behind devastated societies and resentments that fuel instability. Westad warns that unilateral military intervention does not work, and that only open borders, fair economic exchange, and cultural interaction can break the cycle of violence.