The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped from America's Grasp

Product Information

Westad says the seeds of the Cold War were planted much earlier, in the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, when Western nations competed to accumulate colonies in India, Africa, and Asia, China suffered repeated interventions by the West and Japan, and Russia and the United States began to assume greater international prominence. Dozens of books could have made this list. I have chosen some that seem to me to give a strong sense of what it felt like to be living through the cold war and of the fears that people had. Di sinilah, kita akan ikut merasakan rentan, ragu, memahami keinginan mereka yang secara manusiawi di tengah dunia berisiko tinggi yang mereka tinggali. Nonetheless, for all of the missteps and misjudgments – and there were many by all involved – major disasters were somehow avoided. This is all the more amazing because the Soviet Union, the United States and China all had significant internal destabilization at some point during these long years: within Russia it was the period of “de-Stalinization,” when Khrushchev attempted to undo many of the excesses embraced by Stalin during his long rule; in the US, the hysteria of the “Red scare” of the ‘40s and ‘50s was soon followed by domestic unrest resulting from the civil rights movement and the country’s deepening involvement in the unpopular war in Viet Nam; and in China Mao struggled with the Olympian task of rapidly bringing his poor and rural country into the modern age.

The main character is Thomas Kell, who has appeared before in the author's A Foreign Country and is an experienced and well regarded but tainted SIS senior operative, who is languishing outside the service on unpaid leave and trying to find a return route to his profession after some adventures in the aforementioned book. Any of Le Carré’s cold war novels could have made the cut. But I think this, an early one, is the most effective. It brilliantly depicts a bleak, amoral world and it set the benchmark for the many other novels exploring the same material. To mark the anniversary, we’re sharing some of our latest history titles on the Cold War for you to explore, share, and enjoy. We have also granted free access to selected chapters, for a limited time, for you to dip into. 1. The Cold War: A Very Short Introductionby Robert J. McMahonFourthly, and more to the point of the book's premise, I agree with 95% of Marin Katusa's premise, assessment, and warning. His energy, financial, and foreign policy arguments are VERY WELL researched and explained and very compelling. He has put his finger on the pulse of our future and found it to be weak and thready under our current economic/political condition. The love-hate relationship between the MI-6 and CIA is an interesting dimension. Cumming knows his stuff well.

Given the recent confrontation between the two former Cold War superpowers in a post Cold War world, i.e. the Ukraine War, Westad's book may be helpful in reminding us about the dangers a new Cold War poses to the world. US president FDR had lived into the post-war era so that he could have continued to develop his relationship with Soviet leader Stalin in implementing their wartime agreements; The US had not consistently assumed that all nationalist movements were also communist in nature, it might have avoided those repeated interventions in other nations that so often resulted in more warfare;Westad tries to show that these smaller, less powerful countries had some impact on the US and USSR, but often paints the situation in a manner where one of the superpowers acted and the less powerful country reacted. There is a brief chapter on Latin America in which Westad shows that the people in those countries had some agency, but he rarely gives agency to any players outside of the Non-Aligned Movement, led by India. Further, Westad never touches on the people in the "third world" (another trope that delegitimizes people who do not live in Europe or the US) countries outside of the governmental figures. The reader is left wondering what the lives of the citizens in the "third world" countries was like. Other historians have shown that many of them did not care one way or another for communism, capitalism, the USSR, or the US, yet Westad does not examine this at all. With an attempt to describe and explain events over more than half a century of modern history, it is no surprise that this book leaves me with an aching head a sense of the messy complexity of the recent past. But in some sense I find that reassuring. I knew nothing about the Cold War before reading this book, and if I came away from it feeling like I understood it, I would probably have arrived at the wrong approach and incorrect conclusions.