Lee P. Ruddin |
Review of Norman
Stone, The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of
the Cold War. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Pp. xix, 668.
ISBN 978-0-465-02043-0.
|
The past decade has seen the publication of a number of general
overviews of the Cold
War.[1]
This
latest contribution is a "personal history" by Norman Stone. The
Atlantic and Its Enemies is a compelling account of global
affairs from "the nightmare winter of 1946-47" (10) to the
Eighties--"the most interesting
of the post-war decades" (597).
Stone celebrates the eventual fall of communism and stresses that
the Cold War was an active contest that threatened to turn hot,
despite efforts to find an equilibrium, whose outcome was never a
foregone conclusion. "Communism is central, but so is the other
great theme, the extraordinary vigor of the 'capitalist' world"
(xiii).
Owing to the avowedly personal approach, one must start with
biography. Stone (b. 1941) is a Scottish, Cambridge-educated
historian who,
in 1997, forsook the professorship in modern history at Oxford for
Bilkent University, Ankara, where he is now Director of the
Turkish-Russian Center. He made his name a generation ago with two
standard works: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 and Europe Transformed,
1879-1919.[2]
The
present volume is meant to be a continuation of the latter. He has
also served as speech writer and foreign policy adviser for Margaret
Thatcher and been a columnist and commentator for the Sunday Times,
the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, among others.
Stone writes an illuminating and opinionated narrative with the
panache of a journalist and the authority of an Oxbridge don, the
teacher of such prolific historians as David Blackbourn, Harold
James, and Niall Ferguson. One of the most distinguished
Europeanists of his generation, he has an intimate knowledge of a
dozen or so countries and their languages as well.
The Atlantic and Its Enemies
begins just as World War II allies become Cold War adversaries; it
tracks successes and failures on both sides of the Iron Curtain
through the days of containment until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Stone downplays, however, the usual political-diplomatic themes,
referring only briefly to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech
(11, 37, 54) and George Kennan's "Long Telegram" (11), and
completely disregarding President Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall"
speech. Instead, he offers an engaging economics-oriented history,
highlighting the Marshall Plan (38-61), West Germany's
reconstruction and its key role in prompting the creation of the
NATO alliance (68-69, 340), and America's containment of communism by
economic means.
This is not to say, however, that Stone ignores the familiar
episodes: tensions over Berlin, limited warfare in Korea and
Vietnam, the Sixties, Nixon in China, and the Reagan-Thatcher
revolutions. A much less familiar affair (featured in a lengthy
"note") is the ill-fated attempt to smuggle a Hungarian dissident
out of the country that landed Stone in a Slovak prison for three
months (371-81). His service in the Thatcher administration ensures
other glimpses of the personal history promised
in the subtitle.
Although Stone sees the Cold War as "the War of the British
Succession" (17), fought between the United States and the Soviet
Union, his largely Eurocentric perspective is too simplistic, as in
his take on Britain's declining empire and the road to
decolonization: "There was a formula: identification of least
unpalatable power-wielder; minor member of royal family declares
country open; Union Jack wobbles down masthead,
cock-feathered-hatted governor at the salute; a few tears here and
there; old hands stay on, to manage schools; new hands arrive, as
advisers; native dances begin; new flag wobbles up; new anthem is
sung; parliamentary mace is handed over; mayhem begins" (312).
Stone's thesis concerns the triumph of liberal economics and the
Atlantic way. Central to this story are his three heroes: Margaret
Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle, and Helmut Schmidt. But, in a book
chronicling the resilience of the transatlantic world and its
self-regeneration after the stagflation of the 1970s, one would
expect much more on actual transatlantic relations. Yet there is
next to nothing about the personal connections between Western
Europe leaders and the White House. The same goes for relations
between London and Washington, both positive (John F. Kennedy and
Harold Macmillan) and problematic (Lyndon B. Johnson and Harold
Wilson).
Consequently, one must look elsewhere to learn more about, say, the
Skybolt Crisis or the impact of the Vietnam War on Cold War policies.[3]
Apart from discussions of the fallout over the Suez Crisis
(138-42), the Nassau Agreement (250), and Thatcher's stiffening of
the "resolve" of President George H.W. Bush (598), there is
surprisingly little on U.S.-U.K. relations generally. And much of
what is included is misleading. For example, although Stone
correctly says "in Heath's time, the American connection had been
weakened," talk of "Heath showing his usual ineptness when it came
to intuition of reality" wrongly suggests the 47th British Prime
Minister recklessly rocked the Anglo-American boat between 1969 and
1974 (410).[4]
The post-1970 era constitutes a distinct age of renewal, reform,
and rejuvenation in inter-ally relations, which, in contrast to the
heavily-researched period 1941-69, is only now receiving scholarly
attention, thanks, in particular, to the pioneering efforts of
Niklas H. Rossbach.[5]
Stone,
however, does little to further the cause. For example, he
contemptuously labels Jimmy Carter "a hapless fellow
a sort of
sexless Clinton" (306), whose presidency "will [only be] remembered
for its failures" (306), without ever supporting that position in
detail. Thus, he might have contended (but does not) that Carter laid
the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East;
after all, Carter reacted to the fall of the Shah of Iran by
publicly declaring America's aim to maintain regional hegemony. The
"Carter Doctrine," enunciated in his bold 1980 State of the Union
address, led to the establishment of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task
Force (RDJTF), a mobile strategic unit that could be rapidly
deployed to the region. "With this step," regional expert Bahram Rajaee writes,
"the United States began the shift to the unilateral stance that is
familiar today."[6]
The RDJTF led to the creation in 1983 of the more permanent U.S. Central
Command, which was to prove crucially important in the war against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Similarly, Stone might have argued (but does not) that Carter entered
the Oval Office hoping to end the Cold War but actually prolonged it
by supporting the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. To write that "this is a dimension yet to be
explored--or, rather, there is a serious question, as to how far the
Americans were encouraging
what they later called 'fundamentalist
Islam'" (370) is disappointingly equivocal, considering Stone's
colossal expertise.
Chalmers Johnson has shed much light on the dark dealings behind
Carter's signing of the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.[7]
Yet, even with the benefit of hindsight, Stone still
overlooks the ill-omened underside of the Soviet defeat in
Afghanistan--a country, as he himself says, "not very significant in
itself, [but] where geography and the local complications combined
to make it important on a world scale" (382). Nor does he ask
directly whether problems caused by today's Islamism stem from the
covert use of radical Islam to fight communism dating back to the
start of the Cold War.[8]
There are other imbalances and shortcomings. It is peculiar in a
book on American affairs to find eight index entries for Ankara, but
none for Anglo-American relations. As welcome and original as the
inclusion of Turgut
ึzal's government
undoubtedly is, one feels the personal is here badly skewing the
book's subject matter. And, too, while slight errors of fact may be
forgiven (for example, the profession of an architect of the
European Recovery Program [45], or the candy Reagan substituted for
cigarettes [406]), the omission of source citations for quotations
cannot. Stone's six pages of "Further Reading" recommendations (599-604)
leave one feeling short-changed.[9]
In light of the failings I have detailed, Norman Stone's latest book
cannot be said to improve on, or even significantly to supplement,[10]
recent general
histories of the Cold War.
History News Network
leepruddin@yahoo.co.uk
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