Abstract
Jeremy Black's new book provides a wide-ranging historical account that encompasses the period of the ‘long Cold War' beginning in 1917 and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union. He examines it from a global perspective, highlighting the numerous conflicts that were either directly or indirectly associated with the ideological struggle. Indeed, the Second World War appears almost as an inconvenient interval in a more long-standing conflict between communists and anti-communists. However, the book often strays into diplomatic, economic, and other non-military topics without necessarily making the link with military matters. In this sense, whilst the book offers a general history of the ‘long Cold War’ period, it adds limited value as a ‘military history’.
Perhaps the most significant shortcoming of this book is that despite its centrality to the military history of the Cold War, the European ‘Central Front' receives far too little attention. How did NATO seek to defend the ‘Fulda Gap' or the ‘North German Plain'? What were the strengths and weaknesses of NATO armies, air forces and navies? Answers to these questions are notably absent. Only limited attention is allotted to the evolution of the ideas, doctrines, dispositions, interoperability, and command and control of NATO’s defense of Western Europe, much less to the role played by tactical nuclear weapons. Additionally, key issues such as West German rearmament, the French withdrawal from NATO's military command, and the changing East–West military balance, are given less emphasis than they probably merit.
A similar critique can be made about the limited discussion devoted to the strengths and weaknesses of the Warsaw Pact. In the Cold War's aftermath, considerable archival materials and oral histories became available that shed light on the inner workings of the Warsaw Pact. The new documentary evidence, detailing several of the war plans and numerous military exercises, provide important insights about the ability, or lack thereof, of the Warsaw Pact to mount offensive operations in Western Europe. They also provide significant new details of Soviet thinking about nuclear use in support of any potential advance into the West. It is a pity that Black did not draw on this material as it could potentially have enlightened readers about the oft-neglected perceptions the Warsaw Pact held of its NATO opponents. The role of ideas also receives short shrift. The relatively brief chapter on the end of the Cold War (1985–92) fails to engage with the substantial literature on Gorbachev's ‘new thinking' and the reluctant adoption by the Soviet military of concepts such as ‘non-offensive defense'. By switching to a strictly ‘defensive doctrine' in 1987, and restructuring their forces accordingly, the Soviets facilitated the end of the Cold War by altering the military map of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this crucial shift in Soviet doctrine is overlooked.
Beyond the ‘Central Front’, Black provides a fairly comprehensive look at the many ‘hot wars’ associated with the Cold War. As with any comprehensive work of this kind, a wide scope is achieved by sacrificing depth of detail. In terms of style, individual subsections suffer from a randomly uneven balance between narrative and analysis. There is also an attempt to shoehorn some of the topics that deal with longer-term conflicts or trends into chapters covering a more limited time period. Particularly problematic in Black’s descriptions of the ‘hot wars’ is his attempt to explain causation, and the tenuous connections he makes between various events. In the case of major conflicts such as Korea and Vietnam, the descriptions are rather one-sided and no attempt is made to engage with the extensive historiographical debates about these wars. Furthermore, on numerous issues the chronology is questionable or simply inaccurate. In the case of Vietnam, Black refers to a ‘Communist rebellion by the Viet Cong’ in 1957 (p. 112), and the neutralization of Laos in 1960 (p. 113). The former reference is highly questionable, whereas the latter is wrong (1962 is the correct year). When dealing with lesser known conflicts, similar errors are littered throughout the text. To take one example, the 1964–5 Simba rebellion in the Congo is linked to the ‘vicious policies' of Joseph Mobutu (p. 111), despite the fact that Mobutu only seized power (correctly noted on p. 160) after the rebellion had been effectively defeated.
Thus, as a broad survey, this book provides readers who are unfamiliar with both the military and non-military aspects of the Cold War with a highly useful introduction. However, as a ‘military history' of the Cold War the author missed an opportunity to bring new evidence to bear and draw new conclusions that might assist scholars to raise the profile of, or think differently about, the military dimension of the period.