The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace

by Paul Thomas Chamberlin

Overview

A brilliant young historian offers a vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War in which he views the decade-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the twentieth century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was.

In this sweeping, deeply researched book, Paul Thomas Chamberlin boldly argues that the Cold War, long viewed as a mostly peaceful, if tense, diplomatic standoff between democracy and communism, was actually a part of a vast, deadly conflict that killed millions on battlegrounds across the postcolonial world. For half a century, as an uneasy peace hung over Europe, ferocious proxy wars raged in the Cold War’s killing fields, resulting in more than fourteen million dead—victims who remain largely forgotten and all but lost to history.

A superb work of scholarship illustrated with four maps, The Cold War’s Killing Fields is the first global military history of this superpower conflict and the first full accounting of its devastating impact. More than previous armed conflicts, the wars of the post-1945 era ravaged civilians across vast stretches of territory, from Korea and Vietnam to Bangladesh and Afghanistan to Iraq and Lebanon. Chamberlin provides an understanding of this sweeping history from the ground up and offers a moving portrait of human suffering, capturing the voices of those who experienced the brutal warfare.

Chamberlin reframes this era in global history and explores in detail the numerous battles fought to prevent nuclear war, bolster the strategic hegemony of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and determine the fate of societies throughout the Third World.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062367211
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/23/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	613,924
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Paul Chamberlin is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He taught for six years at the University of Kentucky. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University after studying at the American University of Cairo and the University of Damascus and has held fellowships at Yale University and Williams College. His dissertation won the 2010 Oxford University Press prize for the best dissertation in international history. His first book, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order is an international history of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Geography of Cold War-Era Violence 1

1 The Iron Curtain Descends, 1945-1947 21

Part I The East Asian Offensive and the Rise of Third World Communism, 1945-1954 47

2 The Cold War Comes to China, 1945-1946 54

3 The Cold War's First Battlefield, 1946-1949 74

4 Intervening in Korea, 1945-1950 104

5 Rehearsing for World War III, 1950-1954 131

6 French Indochina and the Death of Colonialism, 1945-1954 158

Part II The Indo-Asian Bloodbaths and the Fall of Third World Communism, 1964-1979 175

7 Making a Quagmire in Vietnam, 1961-1965 183

8 The Massacre of the Indonesian PKI, 1965 210

9 The Tet Offensive and Ussuri River Clashes, 1967-1969 230

10 Selective Genocide in Bangladesh, 1971 254

11 The India-Pakistan War, 1971 271

12 The Fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon, 1975-1979 298

13 The Cambodian Nightmare, 1975-1979 330

Part III The Great Sectarian Revolt of the Late Cold War, 1975-1990 359

14 The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1978 366

15 The Iranian Revolution, 1978-1979 393

16 The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, 1978-1979 418

17 The Middle East at War, 1980-1982 452

18 Reagan's War for the Middle East, 1983-1987 491

19 "You Are Creating a Frankenstein," 1988-1990 530

Conclusion 556

Acknowledgments 563

Notes 567

Index 607

Editorial Reviews

Chamberlin convincingly shows that the Cold War (1945–90) was neither cold nor solely a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Chamberlin has done for the Cold War era what Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War did for the Vietnam War. Historians and other informed readers will find much to consider in this significant revisionist work.” — Library Journal

“Ambitious, important… [a] tour de force.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

[An] “eye-opening … precise, painful account of the Cold War.... what’s so valuable about Chamberlin’s book is that it draws the separate wars together into one intelligent, crisply written narrative. Doing so drives home just how relentlessly murderous the Cold War was. It also allows Chamberlin to make an important and novel argument about where the killings took place.” — The Nation

From the Publisher

[An] “eye-opening … precise, painful account of the Cold War.... what’s so valuable about Chamberlin’s book is that it draws the separate wars together into one intelligent, crisply written narrative. Doing so drives home just how relentlessly murderous the Cold War was. It also allows Chamberlin to make an important and novel argument about where the killings took place.

The Nation

Grover Gardner capably narrates Chamberlin’s account of how the Cold War was much hotter than we in the West appreciate. Although there was a tense and uneasy peace in Europe during this period, Chamberlin documents the hot and bloody events that occurred on a line running from the Middle East through Central Asia to Southeast Asia. For the period of the Cold War, more than 90 percent of the deaths of those from the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in this area. Gardner’s voice, although a bit gravelly, is quite good narrating this work. His pacing is easygoing but not too slow, and his voice always appropriately expressive. Overall, his performance quickly draws the listener into this fascinating work. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Grover Gardner capably narrates Chamberlin’s account of how the Cold War was much hotter than we in the West appreciate. Although there was a tense and uneasy peace in Europe during this period, Chamberlin documents the hot and bloody events that occurred on a line running from the Middle East through Central Asia to Southeast Asia. For the period of the Cold War, more than 90 percent of the deaths of those from the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in this area. Gardner’s voice, although a bit gravelly, is quite good narrating this work. His pacing is easygoing but not too slow, and his voice always appropriately expressive. Overall, his performance quickly draws the listener into this fascinating work. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

★ 2018-05-28
A revisionist history of the Cold War era. The traditional historical narrative of the Cold War is that it was a bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during which proxy conflicts occasionally flared, and in which tensions were at times almost unimaginably fraught, but where the two antagonists avoided a hot war. However, as Chamberlin (History/Columbia Univ.; The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order, 2012) shows in this ambitious, important book, while the two nuclear powers never engaged in a shooting war, the era from 1945 to 1990 was hardly the "Long Peace" of legend. The author explores a vast swath of geographical territory and shows how, at the time, these "bloodlands" were engulfed in myriad devastating conflicts, sometimes as Cold War proxies but often as combatants in internecine struggles tied into Cold War politics but not always bound to the major powers. The result was some 14 million deaths, the majority of which were civilians; for them, the war was anything but cold. Chamberlin, who writes gracefully and argues convincingly, sees many of these conflicts predominantly through the American geopolitical lens, but he still takes a broad view of these regional and global politics, which uncoil in phases that follow the geography from east to west. The author's research is impressive, though due to the vast geographic parameters, much of the work is necessarily synthetic. Because of this book's scope, size, and ambition (more than 600 pages including notes and index), it is perhaps churlish to criticize what the author does not address, but hopefully future historians will take Chamberlin's significant arguments and extend them to Africa and Latin America, where they are equally applicable. The international Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union did not lead to World War III, but as Chamberlin ably shows in this tour de force, that does not mean the era's rivalries did not result in widespread carnage.

Kirkus Reviews