What is the main message of The Cold War?

The main message of The Cold War is a comprehensive understanding of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.

How long does it take to read The Cold War?

Reading time for The Cold War may vary, but it typically takes a few hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is The Cold War a good book? Is it worth reading?

The Cold War is worth reading because it provides deep insights into a significant era that shaped our world today.

Who is the author of The Cold War?

The author of The Cold War is Robert J. McMahon.

The Cold War Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Robert J. McMahon

Name: The Cold War
Rating: 4.5 (254 reviews)
Author: Robert J. McMahon

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Get a big-picture understanding of one of the twentieth century’s defining conflicts.

Whole books could be written – and have been – about each of the main events, trends, and leaders of the Cold War. The Arms Race, the Space Race, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Harry Truman, Nikita Khrushchev – the list goes on and on.

With so much to cover, it’s easy to get lost in the details of the 45-year-long conflict that defined the second half of the twentieth century and had a major impact on nearly every corner of the globe.

But what was the Cold War all about? How did it start? Why did it spread? And how did it end? We’ll tackle these questions in the blinks ahead.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Germany loomed large at the beginning of the Cold War;
why the conflict then shifted to Southeast Asia; and
why most of the conflict took place in the developing world.

Key idea 1 of 8

The Cold War arose from the ashes of World War Two.

The year was 1945, and much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins.

After six years of global conflict, World War Two had finally ended. Sixty million people were dead. Another almost 60 million had been left homeless or uprooted. Large swaths of major cities had been reduced to rubble – including over 50 percent of Tokyo, 70 percent of Vienna, 80 percent of Manila, and 90 percent of Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg.

Meanwhile, the world’s international order was also in disarray. For 500 years, it had been dominated by Western European nations. In a historical blink of an eye, the war had knocked them off their pedestal. In their place had risen two rival, continent-spanning superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

The key message here is: The Cold War arose from the ashes of World War Two.

Tension and hostility ran between the US and the Soviet Union both before and during the second World War. As champions of capitalism, the US and its Western European allies viewed the Soviets’ communist ideology as a virus that needed to be contained. To that end, they had subjected the Soviet Union to nearly two decades of economic pressure and diplomatic isolation, starting right from the state’s inception in 1917.

World War Two brought the US, UK, and Soviet Union into an alliance against their common enemy: Nazi Germany. But the relationship between the US and the Soviets was more like a marriage of convenience than a genuine partnership.

The two nations couldn’t even agree on how to fight the war. The Soviet Union wanted the US and UK to open a front against Germany as soon as possible. Pushing back a massive German invasion of their territory, the Soviets were bearing the brunt of the Nazi war machine, and they wanted their allies to provide relief.

But much to the Soviets’ chagrin, the US and UK instead chose to focus first on North Africa and Italy in 1942 and ’43. By the time the US and UK finally invaded German-occupied Normandy in 1944, the Soviets alone were holding back over 80 percent of the Nazis’ military divisions.

Unable to see eye to eye when facing a common foe, the two sides became even more at odds with each other once that enemy was defeated – leaving a power vacuum to fill, a broken world to rebuild, and little agreement on how to proceed.

The Cold War was about to begin.

Key idea 2 of 8

The US sought a favorable balance of power in Eurasia, a global sphere of influence, and superior military strength.

What would the postwar international order look like?

As the leaders of the US, UK, and Soviet Union met in a series of conferences at the end of World War Two, that was the question they faced.

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Key idea 3 of 8

The US sought to complement its global military power with multilateral economic relationships based on free trade.

To establish and sustain global military dominance after World War Two, American strategists believed the US had to achieve multiple objectives at once.

For starters, it needed to maintain an unrivaled navy and air force, a formidable military presence in the Pacific, and outright supremacy in the Western hemisphere. It also needed to play a leading role in the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the defeated Axis countries – Italy, Germany, and Japan – which it wanted to prevent from becoming adversaries again. Finally, the US needed to preserve its monopoly on the biggest trump card in its arsenal: nuclear weapons – which, at the time, only it possessed.

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Key idea 4 of 8

The Soviet Union sought to protect itself by keeping Germany weak and creating a buffer zone in Eastern Europe.

Even before World War Two ended, the US was already starting to pursue its vision of the postwar international order.

In late 1944, it struck a series of economic agreements with its allies at the Bretton Woods Conference, which also laid the foundation for establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. By 1946, the US State Department had drafted an extensive list of “essential” sites for US military bases, which included locations in Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Cuba, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Senegal, Liberia, Morocco, Burma, New Zealand, and Fiji.

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Key idea 5 of 8

Disagreement over postwar Germany helped initiate the Cold War in Europe.

What would be done about Germany?

At the end of World War Two, this was the most vexing question facing the US and the Soviet Union. It was also very much a live question in which both nations already had a vested interest. The US and its allies occupied the western half of Germany, while the Soviets occupied the eastern half.

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Key idea 6 of 8

As communist movements rose up around the region, Southeast Asia became another arena of the Cold War.

As the US and Soviet Union watched what was happening in Europe, both sides saw some of their deepest fears coming true.

For the Soviets, a serious threat seemed to be rising from the rubble of West Germany – the more economically powerful half of their former archenemy, which was now rapidly recovering from the war and had the weight of the US and its allies behind it. For the Americans, an equally serious threat seemed to be rising in the East, where it looked as if the Soviets were well on their way to establishing dominance over Eurasia.

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Key idea 7 of 8

The Cold War was largely fought in and over the so-called “Third World.”

What made Southeast Asia so important to the Soviet Union and the US from the 1950s onward?

Well, by this point, the two sides already viewed each other as enemies, thanks to what had happened in Europe. As the conflict expanded to Asia, each side followed the logic that a setback for their enemy was an opportunity for them.

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Key idea 8 of 8

The Cold War ended where it began: Europe.

To make a long story short, the rest of the Cold War played out as a series of variations on the themes we’ve already covered. In Southeast Asia and the Third World as a whole, the Soviet Union and the US continued to duke it out with each other indirectly by supporting pro-Soviet or pro-US regimes and movements.

From the 1950s to the ‘80s, the conflict ebbed and flowed, as tensions heated and cooled between the superpowers. Sometimes it boiled over into crises that nearly brought them to the brink of war. In the 1950s and ‘60s alone, flashpoints arose in Iran, Guatemala, Indochina, the Taiwanese Strait, the Suez Canal, Lebanon, Indonesia, Cuba, and the Congo.

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