The Atlantic and Its Enemies
A History of the Cold War
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
After World War II, the former allies were saddled with a devastated world economy and traumatized populace. Soviet influence spread insidiously from nation to nation, and the Atlantic powers -- the Americans, the British, and a small band of allies -- were caught flat-footed by the coups, collapsing armies, and civil wars that sprung from all sides. The Cold War had begun in earnest.
In The Atlantic and Its Enemies, prize-winning historian Norman Stone assesses the years between World War II and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. He vividly demonstrates that for every Atlantic success there seemed to be a dozen Communist or Third World triumphs. Then, suddenly and against all odds, the Atlantic won -- economically, ideologically, and militarily -- with astonishing speed and finality.
An elegant and path-breaking history, The Atlantic and Its Enemies is a monument to the immense suffering and conflict of the twentieth century, and an illuminating exploration of how the Atlantic triumphed over its enemies at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stone builds on his expertise in the long 19th century in this very successful overview of a cold war whose end, he says, was a complete surprise. Intellectually, Marxism-Leninism in parts of the West was more of a vital belief system than in the East, where it was an orthodoxy Diplomatically, for every Western success there seemed to be multiple triumphs for Communist countries or Third World proxies. Militarily, a thermonuclear stalemate framed a spectrum of defeats in unconventional wars and insurgencies. Europe was moribund; America was uncertain. Then the U.S.S.R. imploded. The Western-generated forces of individualism and creativity might have been overshadowed, says Stone, but for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who he says personified their re-emergence. The Atlantic world boomed unexpectedly while the East was gridlocked and the Third World hobbled by ideologically based overextension and overmanagement, too arteriosclerotic to withstand the stress of reform. Stone s consistently vivid text presents history as a contingent process whose results are never ideal but neither are they permanent. Illus.
