Long Twilight Struggle

We now know why the superpowers' terrifying standoff never turned hot, argues a leading historian.

THE COLD WAR

A New History

By John Lewis Gaddis

Penguin Press. 333 pp. $27.95

When China's People's Liberation Army suddenly crossed the Yalu River during the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered atomic weapons to be dropped on the Chinese troops. The Soviet Union responded with nuclear attacks on the South Korean cities of Pusan and Inchon. The Americans countered by wiping out Vladivostok and two Chinese cities; the Soviets, in turn, bombed Frankfurt and Hamburg.

All of the above is sheer fiction, of course; no country has used nuclear weapons in wartime since the United States destroyed Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. But in a couple of horrific paragraphs in John Lewis Gaddis's new book, The Cold War , this scenario is presented in straightforward fashion within the otherwise factual narrative, until eventually the author acknowledges the put-on.

This is Gaddis's unconventional way of making an important point: The Cold War was historically significant as much for what didn't happen as for what did. Terrifying though the great global showdown sometimes was, the United States and the Soviet Union never waged a full-scale war. "Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape," Gaddis notes. But nuclear weapons meant that "for the first time in history no one could be sure of winning, or even surviving, a great war." And so the hot wars the superpowers and their proxies fought -- such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan -- were limited in scope.

Gaddis, who teaches history at Yale University, is America's most prominent Cold War historian. He first emerged 34 years ago as a leader of the "post-revisionist" school of Cold War history. The earliest group of historians writing about the Cold War had blamed its origins largely on Joseph Stalin's desire for Soviet domination of Europe. In the late 1950s and '60s, a revisionist school, led by William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin, argued that the Cold War was primarily an outgrowth of American economic interests, which led Moscow to react defensively to potential U.S. encroachment in its backyard.

Enter Gaddis. Rejecting both contentions, his 1972 book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War , portrayed the origins of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union less as the lone fault of one side or the other and more as the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. Gaddis has explored the Cold War in six other books since then, and, in the process, his views have evolved -- most notably in We Now Know (1997), which was rooted in newly opened Soviet archives. Particularly after the Soviet collapse, he has stressed the significance of democratic values and America's ability to deal with its allies in a profoundly more decent fashion than the Soviet Union treated Eastern Europe. In effect, Gaddis has swung back nearly to where the early Cold War historians started by putting the onus of blame on Stalin and the brutal nature of his regime.

Gaddis's latest book boils down the history of the entire Cold War to a sometimes brilliant 266 pages of text, in trenchant, lucid prose intended not for historians and specialists but for ordinary readers. He has not done much new archival field work to produce this new synthesis, and, at times, he relies heavily on his previous work. Yet to Gaddis's credit, he does not merely rewrite himself or retrace the main events from 1946 to 1991. Instead, he stretches to find new ways (like his startling Korean counterfactual above) to cover the subject, stepping back and looking at the entire period with distance and perspective.

Gaddis opens The Cold War , for example, not in Moscow, Washington or Eastern Europe but on an island off the coast of Scotland, where a sickly, depressed English writer named Eric Blair, writing under the pen name of George Orwell, sat down to write his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , the classic portrait of a world of totalitarianism. "It is worth starting with visions . . . because they establish hopes and fears," Gaddis explains. "History then determines which prevail." In the closing pages, he concludes that the Cold War "began with a return of fear and ended in a triumph of hope, an unusual trajectory for great historical upheavals."

Gaddis's efforts at imaginative writing are not always successful. The fictitious passage on the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War, for example, is so out of character with the rest of the book that it leaves the stunned reader wondering what on earth is going on. His concluding chapter mystifyingly diverts into a dissertation on how the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage shows the hazards of historical judgment.