The Global Cold War

In an interview on 1989

Your fourth book is The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. 

This book was written by a Norwegian scholar, now a professor at the London School of Economics. He is a phenomenal researcher who is capable of working in a dozen languages – not just european ones, but also Chinese and some indigenous African languages, which he picked up in younger years when he was as a development worker.

This book was a success amongst professional historians but is less well-known in the popular sphere. It seeks to understand the global Cold War by looking at times when the United States and the Soviet Union intervened in other countries. It comes to the conclusion that interventions benefited no one. They didn’t benefit the United States or the Soviet Union and they certainly didn’t benefit the developing countries that were invaded or intervened upon in some way. And, because he has worked with so many sources from all over the world, it is a very powerful argument. If you have readers who are interested in a good work of serious history on the cold war then I would definitely recommend this book.