The Cold War is historically anomalous. It was awkwardly long, with no clear origin or conclusion. It was awkwardly vast, more genuinely a world war than either of the two 20th century world wars. And it did not fit within any obvious narrative genre. It was a tragedy and a comedy and an epic all at once—tragic in its bloody consequences, comic (at times) in its mutually assured madness, and epic in nature, a decades-long titanic struggle. The Cold War is and was strangely elusive, as both a body of foreign-policy lessons and a collection of horrific mistakes. Who won the Cold War? Who lost it? These remain living questions.
Vladislav Zubok’s wonderfully crafted The World of the Cold War is sensitive to the era’s many anomalies. A Soviet-born historian at the London School of Economics, Zubok has long illuminated the Soviet Union from within for English-language readers. He first did so in Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, an archivally grounded 1996 study of Soviet foreign policy. More recently, Zubok published Collapse, a sweeping chronicle of the Soviet Union’s slide from great-power prominence in 1980 to self-destruction a few years later. The Soviet Union’s sudden disappearance remains the greatest of the Cold War mysteries, and Collapse details it not from the perspective of the Reagan White House but from the Kremlin’s inner sanctums.
As in Zubok’s earlier books, The World of the Cold War de-centers Washington, affording it no privileged position in the narrative. His United States is neither good nor evil; it is mostly confused by the outside world. At the same time, Zubok portrays a Soviet Union that was anxious because it was condemned to compete with a richer, more powerful adversary. It was also held back by poor leadership, including Nikita Khrushchev’s reckless brinksmanship, Leonid Brezhnev’s head-in-the-sand stodginess, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s dreamy incompetence. Zubok restores credible layers of contingency to this history, revealing a three-dimensional, nuanced Soviet Union instead of an inscrutable monolith or cartoonish villain.
The Cold War, in Zubok’s telling, was a product of collective fear. He seems to suggest that the U.S. fears were less grounded than the Soviet ones, since the United States was a supremely well defended country an ocean away from Europe. This contrast pays dividends in analyzing the U.S.-Russia relationship, but it can imply a static set of attitudes and positions, when it was the interaction between Moscow and Washington—at times constructive, at times combustible, at times just strange—that shaped so much Cold War history and what has unfolded in the years since.
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A crowd of people stand outside, some wearing hats, scarves, and overcoats, and look upward.
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“Unwittingly, the Führer created the unique setting for a future Cold War,” Zubok contends early in his book. Adolf Hitler simultaneously drew the Soviet Union and the United States into Europe, having invaded the former in the summer of 1941 and declared war on the latter that same year. By 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States were Europe’s pivotal military powers. They were wartime allies who had signed onto the “Yalta order,” as Zubok terms it, carving up the world into spheres of influence, a bedrock principle of Soviet foreign policy but one that collided with the “American idealist vision” of state sovereignty. Neither power was able to build a stable status quo across Europe, and because Europe was tied through empire to the wider world, U.S.-Soviet tensions on the continent were quickly globalized.
The core U.S.-Soviet collision for Zubok was not the stereotypical Cold War contest between communism and capitalism or between communism and democracy. It was the clash between a Soviet Union mired in “backwardness”—reeling from the losses of World War II and its own unworkable economic ideas—and a United States that chronically exaggerated Soviet power. A restless superpower, the United States pressed for advantage, and it had advantages to press. In Zubok’s opinion, “the Cold War was caused by the American decision to build and maintain a global liberal order.”
Unlike many American scholars, Zubok does not characterize George Kennan, the architect of U.S. Cold War strategy, as a visionary. In his telling, Kennan misread the Soviet Union, and his “analysis suffered from weaknesses and contradictions.” The Soviet Union posed “no military threat” to the Middle East or Western Europe, Zubok claims, and yet Washington convinced itself that this threat was pervasive. In Asia, where Soviet and Chinese military moves were undeniable, the United States massively overreacted, landing itself in the misery of the Vietnam War. This biting assessment has its merits, but Zubok does not do enough to spell out the weaknesses and contradictions of Kennan’s push to contain the Soviet Union, especially since the latter had so rapidly expanded its territorial sway in Europe in 1944 and 1945.
If Hitler unwittingly brought about the Cold War, another German leader unwittingly hurried it to its finish, Zubok argues. This was Willy Brandt, West Germany’s chancellor from 1969 to 1974, who sought détente with the Soviet Union. A rough version of détente had arisen after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when both the United States and the Soviet Union came to see the merits of dialogue and arms control. But the détente of Brandt and other leaders opened the Soviet Union to Western capital and investment, exacerbating the divide between the Soviet Union’s astonishingly inefficient economy and a West in the throes of a technological revolution. In one Cold War irony, the Soviet Union became dependent on its enemy for food, money, and technology. In another, the West funded the Soviet oil and gas industry, helping to form the power base of today’s Russia.
Zubok aligns the end of the Cold War less with a neat denouement than with geopolitical chaos. Still convinced of a hyper-active and ruthlessly strategic Soviet Union, the United States kept on driving for military advantage in the 1980s. China experienced a moment of political instability in 1989, after which Deng Xiaoping strengthened the Communist Party and embraced global capitalism, as he had been doing step-by-step since becoming China’s leader in 1978. An ailing Soviet Union missed the opportunity to follow China, Zubok contends: Brezhnev was too lazy; Yuri Andropov, a Soviet functionary, saw the need but only acquired power in 1982, when he was too sick to do anything; and Gorbachev was history’s fool, pursuing a fantasy Leninism while instilling glasnost amid populations impatient to exit the Soviet imperium. None of this, however, amounted to a U.S. victory, despite the claims of many U.S. politicians and not a few historians.
Washington mistook its luck in 1991 for skill, Zubok suggests, dooming its post-Cold War moment in the sun and compelling a repetition of old missteps. He plausibly connects Cold War triumphalism with a later American hubris. The Cold War had induced excessive militarization and rampant interventionism, Zubok argues. Instead of curbing these tendencies when the Soviet Union collapsed, Washington continued to exaggerate outside threats and enabled the excessively warlike U.S. foreign policy thereafter. One result of this was an overreaching global war on terror that ended up draining the U.S. treasury and sapping the self-confidence of its citizens.
Over the past decade, China and other countries, including Russia, have found ways to constrain U.S. power. The world is no longer interconnected by free trade, a doctrine that U.S. President Donald Trump and many Democrats reject, and democratization has lost ground to burgeoning authoritarianism. The demise of the U.S.-led order has been accompanied by a series of regional wars in Africa, the Middle East, and, of course, Europe.
Zubok, whose criticisms of U.S. foreign policy are thought-provoking, could be more critical of Russia’s post-Cold War path. He links the United States’ aggressive global order building after the Cold War to Russia’s emergence as a “rogue state.” Efforts to construct a liberal order in Europe, coupled with NATO enlargement, he suggests, pushed Russia in the wrong direction. Yet he does too little to connect Russia’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and then in 2022 to internal patterns of Russian decision-making and, by extension, to Soviet history.
Zubok does write about a cadre of KGB officers and Soviet officials, Putin among them, who indulged a “vision of a never ending Cold War” in the 1970s and 1980s. Outraged by Gorbachev, they perceived the fall of the Soviet Union not as a chance to fashion a westward leaning Russia or to beat swords into ploughshares but as the agonizing loss of empire. When Boris Yeltsin promoted Putin to the presidency in 1999, Yeltsin may not have consciously empowered the worldview of these officers and officials. Still, he opened the door to their ascent, making their interpretation of the Cold War determinative for Russian foreign policy.
Yet left unexplored are two threads extending from the Cold War to Russia’s serial invasions of Ukraine. The first is Moscow’s zero-sum attitude toward U.S. and Western power. There was considerable naiveté and wishful thinking in expanding NATO and the European Union to Russia’s doorstep, but it was never the prelude to a Western invasion of Russia. It threatened Putin’s pride much more than it threatened Russia. The training that he received in his corner of the KGB surely encouraged Putin to exaggerate the threat posed by the West. Putin’s neo-Cold War mindset limited his options in 2014, paving the way to brutal wars that have left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians dead, while cutting Russia off from European markets and investment.
The other thread that can be pulled from the historical record is the Yalta order about which Zubok writes so cogently. As Zubok explains, the Soviet Union openly endorsed spheres of influence, enjoying enormous power in Eastern and Central Europe and maintaining it for decades at the barrel of a gun. On a smaller scale, Putin has done something similar in Belarus, and with military force he is trying to transform Ukraine into a sphere of Russian influence. This is as much a choice made by Putin as it is a reaction to the order Europeans and Americans constructed in the 1990s and thereafter.
When Putin and Trump met in Alaska on Aug. 15, references to Yalta proliferated. They were hastily drawn. Though Putin and Trump may join hands in an aspirational Yalta order for Europe, the Europe of today is no longer the Europe of the 1940s and 1950s. It is contesting Putin’s actions with military force, and Ukraine is manifestly not a pawn on some Cold War chessboard. Our world is and is not the world that the Cold War made: It is haunted by an East-West contest for Europe that has no end—as Zubok’s remarkable work of history shows—but it has also moved on, inviting new forms of global power and inventing new kinds of global agency.
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