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The real Cold War was hot: The global struggle for
the Third World

Mark T. Berger

To cite this article: Mark T. Berger (2008) The real Cold War was hot: The global struggle for the
Third World, Intelligence and National Security, 23:1, 112-126, DOI: 10.1080/02684520701798171

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 REVIEW ARTICLE

The Real Cold War Was Hot: The Global

Struggle for the Third World

MARK T. BERGER

Larry Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone:
A Memoir of 1960–1967. New York, Public Affairs, 2007. Pp.xi þ 304.
$26.00/£15.99, hardback, ISBN-10 978-1-58648-405-2.

Gerald Horne, Cold War in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor
and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies. Philadelphia, Temple
University Press, 2007. Pp.267. $25.95/£13.99, paperback, ISBN-13 9978-1-
59213-628-5.

Jurgen Ruland, Eva Manske and Theodor Hanf, eds., U.S. Foreign Policy
toward the Third World: A Post-Cold War Assessment. Armonk, NY, M.E.
Sharpe, New Edition, September 2005. Pp.xv þ 269. $29.95/£19.95, paper-
back, ISBN 0-7656-1621-1.

Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administra-

tion, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (The Harvard
Cold War Studies Book Series). New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2006. Pp.ix þ 304. $75.00/£54.50, hardback, ISBN-10 0742553817.

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the
Making of Our Times. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Pp.xiv þ 484. £25.00/$35.00, hardback, ISBN-13 978-0-521-85364-4.

We are approaching the end of the second decade of the post-Cold War era.
For the past 20 years there has been a steady reassessment, both conceptual
and empirical, of the history of the Cold War.1 Some of this literature has left
a great deal of our overall understanding of the Cold War intact, while others
have challenged either our understanding of particular themes or the way we

Intelligence and National Security, Vol.23, No.1, February 2008, pp.112 – 126
ISSN 0268-4527 print 1743-9019 online
DOI: 10.1080/02684520701798171 Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 113

framed the Cold War as a whole.2 In the latter case, one important change has
been to place greater emphasis on the need to reframe the Cold War as a
global struggle in which the overall dynamics were not nearly as centered on
the interaction between Moscow and Washington as formerly argued. For
example, for many observers at the time, the central axis of the Cold War ran
from Washington to Moscow, with very few stops along the way. Henry
Kissinger, one of the master geo-politicians of the Cold War, was famously
quoted in the late 1960s as saying ‘[n]othing important can come from the
South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history
starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to
Tokyo.’3 Meanwhile, writing in the second half of the 1980s, one of the Cold
War’s most prominent historians, John Lewis Gaddis, characterized the
global 40-year struggle as the ‘long peace’.4 Kissinger and Gaddis reflect the
still influential Atlantic-centered conception of the Cold War. This emphasis
is particularly central in the case of both the older and some of the more
recent studies of the origins of the Cold War.5
If, however, as the proponents of the Atlantic-centered perspective still
assume, the Cold War was a ‘long peace’ it was a ‘long conventional peace’
and it was centered primarily on Europe. As is now increasingly clear, a
preoccupation with Europe and a narrow understanding of the Washington–
Moscow axis neglects the way in which the onset of the Cold War in the
second half of the 1940s coincided with a major wave of decolonization, with
profound world-historical implications. This led to the emergence of a
growing array of post-colonial nation-states and in many instances decades-
long wars of national liberation, along with revolution and counter-revolution
(insurgency and counterinsurgency) in what became known as the Third
World. Between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s the potent combination of
decolonization and the Cold War catapulted many nationalist leaders into
positions of power in international politics. This occurred in the context of a
wider effort to mobilize around a variety of Third Worldist initiatives that
directly challenged the idea and the practice of an international Cold War
order driven primarily by the interaction between Washington and Moscow.
Since at least the 1980s, a growing number of writers have sought to come
to grips with the central role the Third World, or various sub-regions, now
appear to have played in the Cold War.6 The corollary of this, of course, has
been a growing recognition, at least in some quarters, that the existence of the
Third World was a product of the Cold War, and it has therefore lost its
intellectual and political relevance in the post-Cold War era. Of course, the
Third World continues to be used as short hand for a diverse array of so-
called ‘developing countries’. However, a strong case can be made for seeing
the Third World as having risen and fallen in tandem with the rise and demise
of the Cold War. The term itself appears to have first entered journalistic and
114 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

academic discourse in 1952, having been coined by Alfred Sauvy (1898–

1990), a demographer and historian of the French economy.7 However, it was
the Bandung Conference of 1955 that crystallized the idea of the Third World
and provided the point of departure for the various movements and initiatives
with which the idea became associated.8 Following the Bandung conference
in Indonesia, the idea of the Third World was increasingly deployed to
generate unity and support among a growing number of non-aligned nation-
states whose governments were reluctant to take sides in the emerging Cold
War between a US-centered First World and a Soviet-centered Second
World.
The notion of a Third World was taken up and promulgated by influential
political leaders, such as Jawaharlal Nehru (Prime Minister of India, 1947–
64) and Sukarno (President of Indonesia, 1945–65). The idea of a Third
World informed the establishment of organizations such as the Movement of
Non-Aligned Countries, which was set up in 1961. Following the Sino-Soviet
split in 1960, Third Worldism also had its Soviet and Maoist varieties. The
former was seen as incorporating those governments in the Third World
which were formally allied with the USSR. This Moscow-oriented Third
Worldism sought to establish a broad front between the Second World and
the Third World against the First World.9
The Maoist variant articulated a Beijing-oriented Third Worldism, in
which China was part of the Third World, against the First World of which
the USSR was perceived to be a part. Both Moscow and Beijing’s ambitions
were complicated, by, among other things, the sheer number of new nation-
states that had appeared by the 1980s. Between the 1940s and the 1980s the
membership of the United Nations (UN) rose from 51 to 156 nation-states. As
a result Third World governments gained greater influence at the UN and this
led to a formal call by the United Nations in April 1974 for a New
International Economic Order (NIEO).10
By the beginning of the 1980s the initiatives associated with the NIEO
were in retreat as the British government, particularly during Margaret
Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister (1979–90), and the US government,
especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–89), sought to
reinvigorate the Cold War and downplay the North–South conflict. With the
end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s, some commentators
sought to reorient and revitalize the idea of a Third World, while others felt
that the idea of a Third World had lost its utility.11 The former argue that the
new circumstances of the post-Cold War era can still be clarified and
improved via the elaboration and reconfiguration of the idea of the Third
World. The latter emphasize that the spatial divisions of the Cold War era,
between the First, Second and Third Worlds, have become scrambled and
irrelevant in the 1990s.
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 115

This review article examines a range of books, all of which come at the
Cold War (or post-Cold War) era in terms of how it was, or in one case still is
being, played out in what was, and for some observers still is usefully, viewed
as the Third World. They all draw attention to the fact that a fuller
appreciation of the Cold War demands a global perspective that shifts the
center of gravity away from a narrow preoccupation with the struggle
between Washington and Moscow.

COLONIALISM PASSING, COLD WAR RISING

Apart from the more academic literature, which has included a growing
number of detailed biographies and more general analytical and empirical
work, the last two decades has also seen the publication of memoirs, and
autobiographies, by participants in the Cold War. For example, a relatively
short book, by Larry Devlin, who was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
station-chief in the Congo in the early 1960s, helps draw attention to the fact
that the Third World was both important in, and a creation of, the Cold War.
Devlin makes it clear at the outset of Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone
that he continues to believe in the righteousness and the importance of the US
anti-Communist crusade in the Congo specifically and the one-time Third
World more generally. He is unapologetic about the need for constant
vigilance on the part of covert operators such as himself, not to mention the
more overt activities in which the US engaged to contain Moscow’s influence
in the Third World during the Cold War. He notes that his time in the Congo
in the 1960s ‘was a tough, tiring time’, but being able to play a role in
‘accomplishing American objectives and contributing to the defeat of the
Soviet Union made it worthwhile’. He also makes clear that he regards
Joseph Desire Mobutu (who came to power in the early 1960s and ruled the
Republic of Congo, renamed Zaire in 1974, down to the late 1990s) as having
provided an effective anti-Communist government in the large central
African state (p.266). Of course, the latter conclusion is a subject of
considerable debate. The post-Cold War Congo’s collapse into a ferocious
‘civil war’ that killed millions of people and transcended its formal borders,
while bringing virtually all the neighboring states into the struggle, raises
serious questions about the effectiveness of the Mobutu regime, prior to its
collapse. In particular one can ask whether Mobutu’s rule made any progress
whatsoever in relation to the creation of an institutional framework that met
the most minimum standards of a sovereign modern nation-state.12
Throughout the Cold War the Congo under Mobutu was a major client
state for Washington in its wider struggle for influence in the Third World.
According to Devlin, Mobutu, with whom he worked closely, ‘had many
faults’, but he did not have ‘as many as the media has attributed to him’.
116 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Furthermore, he was ‘a courageous man and a strong but realistic nationalist

when I dealt with him in the 1960s’ (pp.266–7). Devlin ends his book in the
1960s and has nothing substantive to offer to our understanding of the post-
Cold War disaster that is the Congo today. His lack of serious discussion of
the Congo today may be excused as being beyond the scope of his book.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the origins of the contemporary crisis
in the Congo are to be found in the 1960s and in the way in which the Cold
War quickly became entwined with the colonial legacy in the Congo and
elsewhere.13
Another book, which also emphasizes the significance of the Cold War in a
Hot Zone, and the collision between the Cold War and the colonial legacy, is
Gerald Horne’s new book on the English-speaking Caribbean. In his book,
Horne focuses on the history of the Caribbean Labor Congress in the former
British West Indies and its role in wider labor and nationalist movements in
the region. In particular his book, which marches to a very different drummer
than Devlin both politically and analytically, is ‘about the impact of the early
Cold War in shaping today’s former British West Indies’. He emphasizes that
the region is ‘characterized by the continuing influence of labor’ (in
Barbados, both the ruling and opposition parties are known as ‘Labor’
parties). This trend has been crucial to securing ‘one of the most pervasive
regional democracies in the developing world’ (p.3). This line of argument is
in sharp contrast to Cold Warriors such as Devlin who emphasized the
importance of taming and/or eliminating trade unions and radical nationalists.
For Horne, the former British Caribbean provides evidence in support of the
‘the relatively grand idea that a precondition for a thriving democracy is the
organization and influence of what is the majority in most nations: labor’
(p.3). At the same time, Horne makes clear that he thinks that the impact of
the Cold War on the labor and nationalist movements was on balance
negative. His detailed history of the labor movement in the former British
West Indies makes clear that radical labor leaders and organizers in particular
‘became the primary victims’ of the onset of Cold War in the British West
Indies (p.14). At the same time, in relation to the workers that these leaders
mobilized he concludes that it is ‘hard to see how’ they ‘benefited from the
Cold War that afflicted the Hot Zone that is the former British West Indies’
(p.211).
Despite their profound differences the books by Devlin and Horne make
clear the crucial importance of the Third World to international relations and
the Cold War. This historiographical turn is also clearly manifested in The
Eisenhower Administration, the Third World and the Globalization of the
Cold War, edited by Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns. Contrary to
many an edited book, which has a declared rather than real coherence, the
contributors all focus in nicely on themes related to the Eisenhower
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 117

Administration’s approach to the Third World in the 1950s. The book, which
contains a useful bibliographic essay, is also uniformly critical of US foreign
policy in this period. As David L. Anderson points out in his conclusion the
contributors by and large ‘find the Eisenhower’s administration’s policies in
the Third World to be less than inspired’. This in turn produced a not so
virtuous circle of ‘self-serving and self-defeating’ activity. In fact, for
Anderson, and for most of the contributors, Eisenhower and his advisors
paved the way for the perpetual ‘crisis management of the 1960s’ as a result
of their ‘inability to manage and prepare for change’ in the Third World in
the 1950s (pp.276–9). Again implicit, if not explicit, to his analysis is the idea
that the roots of the crisis of the nation-state in many parts of the world within
a couple of decades of decolonization lie in the interstices of the legacy of
late colonialism and the dynamics of the Cold War. Furthermore, the
invention of the Third World reflected the view of the leaders in the First,
Second and Third World that ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism, or
‘genuinely existing’ state socialism, when combined with the establishment
of a modern nation-state would put the citizens concerned on the path to
modernity.

DECOLONIZATION RISING, COLD WAR GLOBALIZING

The most explicit repositioning of the Third World in relation to the history
of the Cold War has been provided in Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold
War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. It is worth
quoting him at length to drive home the key theme of his book: ‘The Cold
War is still generally assumed to have been a contest between two
superpowers over military power and strategic control, mostly centered on
Europe’ (p.396). By contrast he argues that ‘the most important aspects of the
Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but
connected to political and social development in the Third World’ (p.396). In
his view, the closely connected processes of ‘Third World radicalization’ and
‘decolonization’ were not ‘products of the Cold War’. However, they were
ultimately ‘influenced by it in ways that became critically important and that
formed a large part of the world as we know it today’ (p.396). Furthermore,
according to Westad, ‘the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism
through slightly different means’. By this he means that the ‘methods of the
superpowers and of their local allies were remarkably similar to those honed
during the later phase of European colonialism’. This was manifested in the
‘giant social and economic projects, bringing promises of modernity to their
supporters and mostly death to their opponents or those who happened to get
in the way of progress’ (p.396). In fact, he concludes that for ‘the Third
World, the continuum of which the Cold War forms a part did not start in
118 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

1945, or even in 1917’. In his view the key date was ‘1878 – with the
Conference of Berlin that divided Africa between European imperialist
powers – or’ maybe even ‘1415, when the Portuguese conquered their first
African colonies’ (p.396). For Westad, ‘not even the conflict between the
superpowers, or its ideological dimension, was a new element’ in the long
history of ‘attempted European domination’ (p.396). The ultimate tragedy of
the Cold War for both the erstwhile ‘Third World’ and the respective
superpowers (with the US ‘distinctly being more ‘‘super’’ than’ the USSR)
‘was that two historical projects that were genuinely anticolonial in their
origins became part of a much older pattern of domination’. For Westad this
was ‘because of the intensity of their conflict, the stakes they believed were
involved, and the almost apocalyptic fear of the consequences if their
opponents won’. Westad concludes that although ‘both Washington and
Moscow remained opposed to formal colonialism throughout the Cold War,
the methods they used in imposing their version of modernity on the Third
World countries were very similar to those of the European empires that had
gone before them’. In particular he argues that this was ‘especially’ the case
in relation to ‘the British and French colonial projects of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries’ (pp.397, 403).
Westad’s The Global Cold War makes a tremendous contribution to the
reframing of our understanding of the Cold War as a contest in which the
Third World was central rather than peripheral. At the same time, while
shifting the historiographical terms of reference in persuasive detail, he
overstates the continuity between the post-1945 Cold War ‘empires’ of
Washington and Moscow and the earlier formal colonial empires in the
centuries prior to the Second World War. After 1945 the United States
presided over the universalization and consolidation of the UN-centered
nation-state system, with the Soviet Union emerging as its only significant
rival. With decolonization and the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet
Union (in fact after 1917 in the case of the latter) departed in crucial ways
from earlier forms of colonialism.
Most significantly, in political and administrative terms both the United
States and the Soviet Union ruled over ‘empires’ that were made up of
formally independent and sovereign nation-states. That is, these entities were
explicitly ascribed the status of sovereign nation-states rather than that of
colonies, or protectorates, or dependencies, within the broader ambit of
‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism and ‘genuinely existing’ state
socialism, both of which assumed and facilitated the global spread of the
nation-state system. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks
sought to control the different non-Russian nationalities and contain
nationalism within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by promoting
accepted forms of national identity and nationhood without offering
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 119

substantive autonomy or independence.14 As Benedict Anderson has

observed in his now classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities,
the USSR was ‘as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the
nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century international
order’.15
At the broadest level the USSR prior to (and after) World War II
represented a particularly rigid and brutal version of the League of Nations,
both of which were, in retrospect, transitional institutions in relation to the
decline of colonialism and the universalization of the nation-state system.
After the First World War, the League of Nations turned the colonies of
Germany and its allies over to the member governments that were already
established colonial powers. The victorious powers were granted the
mandates for the administrative control of, and responsibility for, the former
colonies and territories of their rivals, but they were expected to account for
their administration of the mandates to a Permanent Mandate Commission
(PMC) established by the League. But the PMC was institutionally weak and
the mandate system primarily benefited the colonial powers, most of which
were effectively members of the Permanent Mandates Commission. In 1939
the League did nothing to prevent the onset of the Second World War after
which it was dissolved and replaced by the UN.
The UN emerged against the backdrop of the continuing crisis of
colonialism, the dramatic spread of nationalism and decolonization in Asia
and Africa and the consolidation of the Cold War. The world after 1945 was
one in which formally independent and sovereign nation-states displaced
colonial empires as the key units of global politics. In the Cold War era the
relationship between the respective superpowers and their allies was
increasingly mediated by systems of military alliances, regional organiza-
tions, and new international institutions such as the United Nations. In
economic terms, meanwhile, US hegemony in the second half of the 20th
century can be characterized as ‘postimperial’. This was particularly the case
by the 1970s, by which time the nation-state system had been universalized
and the overall contours of globalization were just beginning, at least in
retrospect, to become apparent. The empires of the late colonial and pre-
World War II era were grounded to a great degree in the regulation and
control of colonial markets by the metropolitan powers. However, the
economic arrangements that were put in place under US auspices after World
War II paved the way for large corporations to increasingly transcend
dependence on particular metropolitan governments for regulatory and other
support. This trend became most apparent in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is
grounded in the post-1945 settlement that sought to ‘reconcile openness’ with
the Keynesian orientation of national leaders to ensure national and
international economic stability and full employment.16
120 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Apart from the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank)
were also central to the US-led international framework of ‘genuinely
existing’ liberal capitalism in the Cold War era. This emergent Cold War
order was also grounded in initiatives such as the Marshall Plan of 1948 –
which was seen as being central to the reconstruction of West Germany in
particular – and the Point IV Program of 1949. This occurred under the
stewardship of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. It was, however,
during the administration of John F. Kennedy (1961–63) and his immediate
successor, Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69), that US-led modernization and
nation-building reached its apex.17
The Kennedy administration placed considerable emphasis on the need for
a more ambitious nation-building and counterinsurgency strategy in the Third
World. This involved taking the initiative in Asia and Latin America, as well
as the Middle East and Africa, to counter the communist threat via the
infusion of increased levels of military and economic aid, advice and support.
In the 1960s the promotion of national development generally and nation-
building more specifically was grounded in a high degree of state
involvement in the market. This ranged from dual exchange rates, tariff
barriers and the subsidization of petrol and staple foods to the attempt to
provide education and health care and a range of other social services, not to
mention land reform and the expansion of military establishments. All of this
increasingly exceeded the administrative and financial capacity of a majority
of nation-states in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania and Latin America.
The results by the 1970s were rising levels of foreign debt, bloated and
ineffective bureaucracies presided over by often increasingly corrupt elites.18
Westad overstates the continuity between Soviet and US intervention in the
Third World, on the one hand, and the formal colonial empires that preceded
the Cold War era, on the other hand. However, it was nevertheless the case
that during the Cold War the contradiction between the US as a repressive
military power and guardian of the interests of capital on the one hand, and its
position as liberal anti-Communist defender of freedom on the other hand
became more pronounced. The Soviet Union too still bore traces of earlier
more formal imperial projects. However, it is the differences rather than the
continuities that are critical to understanding the centrality of the Third World
to the Cold War.

COLD WAR PASSING, POST-COLD WAR RISING

At the same time, it can be argued that the end of the Cold War brought down
the curtain on the Third World and on Third Worldism. This is not to say that
some commentators (in fact their numbers are legion) still regard the Third
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 121

World as a relevant point of reference for the discussion and assessment of

US foreign policy into the post-Cold War era. This shortcoming is readily
apparent in Jurgen Ruland, Eva Manske and Theodor Hanf’s edited
collection, U.S. Foreign Policy toward the Third World: A Post-Cold War
Assessment, which appeared in 2006. The editors use the term ‘Third World’
interchangeably with the ‘Global South’, compounding, rather than
clarifying, the changes in world politics with the end of the Cold War.
Based on a 2002 conference they have collected together a series of
uniformly unimaginative chapters that provide considerable description, but
little in the form of analysis. There is no attempt to reassess the Cold War,
which reinforces their continued commitment to an anachronistic framework
for their ‘post-Cold War assessment’ of US foreign policy in the ‘Third
World’. Following an introduction on US foreign policy ‘Towards the Global
South in the Post-Cold War, Post-Bipolar Era’, there is a chapter on
multilateralism, unilateralism, internationalism and isolationism by Hanns W.
Maull. This focus on thematic chapters is rounded off by a contribution by
James M McCormick on ‘decision-making’ in US foreign policy in which he
asks whether ‘there is a Third World Lobby’ in Washington. He concludes
that there is something that can be called a ‘Third World Lobby’. At the same
time, in his view, its influence has been primarily ‘ethical’ or related to the
attempted insertion of new items onto the agenda, or the maintenance of
existing items, and in no respect can it be said to directly shape US foreign
policy. Furthermore, he regards his conclusions as preliminary and says that
much more research needs to be done on the ‘Third World Lobby’ (pp.80–1).
In fact, one can ask if anything so all encompassing, and nebulous, as an even
partially unified Third World Lobby could exist in the first place, given the
general disarray of Third Worldism even prior to the end of the Cold War.19
This is followed by a chapter on US foreign policy towards post-Cold War
Latin America by Howard Wiarda and the post-Cold War Middle East by
William B. Quandt. The vagaries of post-Cold War US foreign policy
towards Southeast Asia are explained by Amitav Acharya and those towards
South Asia by Sumit Ganguly and Brian Shoup. Then it is time to turn to
Central Asia, guided by Conrad Schetter and Bernd Kuzmits and Africa by
Peter J. Schraeder. While the world has changed, the regional divisions that
were the key markers of the ‘Third World’ continue to underpin this ‘post-
Cold War assessment’. A brief general comment, followed by a specific
example, might serve to make the point of how increasingly problematic the
approach taken in this book is. While the division of the world into discrete
regions for the purposes of study and assessment (‘Area Studies’) came of
age during the Cold War, the utility of such divisions was always open to
question. With the end of the Cold War those divisions were increasingly
challenged by both critics and policy-makers who sought to grasp the
122 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

integration and fragmentation associated with globalization. This has meant

that international studies, or global studies, has increasingly displaced area
studies, although the terms on which the displacement or merger has taken
place are many and varied.20 To be more specific in relation to the book at
hand, any attempt to examine post-Cold War, and more particularly post-9/11
Southeast Asia, immediately calls into question the very notion of ‘Southeast
Asia’. Anyone but the most superficial observer has their attention
immediately drawn to both the lack of homogeneity of the region itself
(the very idea of which only came into being during the Cold War), and the
powerful linkages that various bits and pieces of Southeast Asia have outside
the region. From questions of migration to the Global War on Terror
(GWOT), key parts of Southeast Asia generally, and US foreign policy
towards the region more specifically, can only be understood with reference,
for example, to the Middle East, a less than unitary category itself. Nor
should we forget the connections and vectors, both closer to home and further
afield.
In a conclusion, entitled ‘US Policy toward the Global South After
September 11, 2001’, the lead editor, Jurgen Ruland, draws six general
conclusions from the collection of thematic and regional chapters. First, he
notes that there is a wide and vocal array of lobbyists and think tanks, as well
as a continuing and relatively untapped range of scholarly expertise in the
more traditional university sector, with an equally wide array of policy
prescriptions. At the same time, he laments that the expertise available is not
utilized while the range of single-issue advocates has facilitated the
‘pluralization of US foreign policy’. The result has been a lack of
effectiveness generally and in relation to the ‘Third World’ more specifically.
The second and related point is that the post-Cold War era has seen an
increased ‘lack of coherence and continuity in American foreign policy
toward countries of the South’ (pp.231–2). Third, this latter problem has been
reflected in the highly uneven promotion of democracy and human rights on
the part of the US. The fourth point, meanwhile, is that overall US foreign
policy towards the Third World was downgraded with the end of the Cold
War, with certain exceptions (pp.233–4). Fifth, he notes that in the 1990s,
security concerns were ‘downgraded’ in favor of economics as far as US
foreign policy toward the Third World was concerned. Finally, during the
Clinton administration and, of course, even more so, under his successor,
multilateralism gave way to unilateralism, reflected in particular in
Washington’s growing ‘displeasure’ with the United Nations (p.235). In
relation more specifically to the administration of George W. Bush, Ruland
perceives the post-9/11 commitment to ‘poverty alleviation and assistance for
the least developed countries in Africa’ and elsewhere as potentially ‘little
more than symbolic politics’. Writing in 2005, he lamented that if this is the
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 123

case then it will be increasingly easy for ‘critics to discredit the moral
imperatives of U.S. policy as an ideological mantle for hegemonic
ambitions’. In his view, the ‘loss of American ‘‘soft power’’ in the South
will then be immense’ (p.250).
By clinging to notions of a ‘Third World’ and a ‘Global South’ none of these
chapters address head-on the fact that one of the key characteristics of the post-
Cold War era has been the growth in the number of collapsing/collapsed states.
The end of the Cold War both contributed to, and drew greater attention to, the
increasing number of nation-states mired in civil conflict and/or civil war and
characterized by their complete absence of political stability and social order.
By 2005 the World Bank had identified 30 ‘low-income countries under stress’
(LICUSs), including Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Haiti, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia,
Sudan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the British
government’s Department for International Development (DFID) listed almost
50 polities that it regarded as ‘fragile’ states.21 If a stricter measure of stability
is used, and a serious notion of what the delivery of basic rights and services to
the majority of a nation-state’s citizens entails, the list of collapsing or failing
states increases dramatically.22 The Cold War pitted insurgencies against
counterinsurgencies (revolutionaries against counter-revolutionaries, as well as
radical reformers against social and political conservatives). This was played
out in the context of the wider contest between ‘genuinely existing’ liberal
capitalist and ‘genuinely existing’ state socialist forms of nation-building and
development. However, the primary axis of the Cold War remained centered
on inter-state rivalry (at the heart of which was always the Washington–
Moscow axis) rather than addressing the specificity of revolution and counter-
revolution (the local roots of conflict and instability) in the Americas, Asia,
Africa and the Middle East.23
With the end of the Cold War, and further highlighted by the events of
September 11, 2001, conflict and violence in many parts of the world has
been driven by a combination of old and new forms of insurgency and
revolution. At the same time, as a result of its use of military force to punish
or overthrow regimes it perceives as threats to international order and US
national security, Washington has hastened state collapse. For instance, in
Iraq some insurgents are fighting to evict the United States and see their
struggle as a war of national liberation against a foreign occupier. At the
same time a second group, which is primarily comprised of foreigners,
increasingly views Iraq as an important battlefield in the global jihad and a
convenient place to kill Americans. Still other Iraqi insurgents see the
primary enemy as the new Iraqi government, with sectarian cleavages
(particularly, but not exclusively, between Sunni and Shi’a) increasingly
coming to the fore.24 Fundamentalist political Islam ‘is simply one variety of
124 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

a new global phenomenon in world politics’. From this point of view ‘[i]t is
not the cause of the current crisis’; it is ‘an expression of it and response to it’
and one of the many vectors of an ‘emerging, new world disorder’.25 This is
the context in which the US military in Iraq is seeking to facilitate the
building of a new nation-state that is acceptable to Washington, to regional
actors – both state and non-state in character – and to the Iraqis themselves.26
The struggle to create a new Iraq (and as time goes by, the ever more likely
prospect of failure and retreat) is taking place against the backdrop of a wide
range of far less prominent counterinsurgency nation-building activities (with
uneven results) from Afghanistan to the Philippines, to Colombia and
beyond. At the start of the 21st century, and half a century since the UN was
first established, the organization’s weak position in the wider post-Cold War
order serves to highlight the fact that the nation-state system itself is in crisis.
Furthermore, the erstwhile Third World, as during the Cold War, is central to
rather than peripheral to global politics, even as its coherence as a political
and geographical entity loses or has lost any real purchase.

CONCLUSION: THE REAL COLD WAR WAS HOT

Since the end in the late 1980s the post-Cold War era has provided the
context for both a reassessment and revision of the history of the Cold War
and the role of the one-time Third World in that struggle. The end of the Cold
War has also thrown into sharper relief the crisis of the nation-state system
that was gestating during the Cold War. The advances and new insights into
the significance of the Cold War, particularly the growing emphasis on the
Third World as a pivotal player, are reflected in the Westad’s impressive
study of the Global Cold War. It is also reflected in some of the less
ambitious, more tightly focused studies that have opened up new ways of
understanding the Cold War and provided the framework for understanding
the post-Cold War order. It is unfortunate, however, that some writers
(exemplified by Ruland et al.’s U.S. Foreign Policy toward the Third World:
A Post-Cold War Assessment) remain committed to the old terminology and
the old categories, which were fluid and dynamic during the Cold War and
now obscure rather than illuminate our understanding of both the past and the
present. Fortunately, the latter works seem to be increasingly overshadowed
by books such as the Global Cold War by Westad. Despite its shortcomings,
Westad has produced a benchmark study that will undoubtedly take many
years to be equaled or surpassed as a comprehensive study of the Third World
and the Global Cold War. Thanks to Westad and others we can no longer
ignore the fact that the ‘real’ Cold War was ‘hot’, in terms of the character of
conflict it took and the type of climate in many parts of the world where it
was played out.
THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD 125

NOTES
1 See Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold
War (Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1989). Melvyn P. Leffler, A
Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 1992). Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold
War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992). Melvyn P.
Leffler and David S. Painter, Origins of the Cold War: An International History (London:
Routledge 1994). Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide
Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
1994). Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory
(London: Frank Cass 2000). David Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London:
Routledge 2000). David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (New
York: W.W. Norton 2000). Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (New
York: Oxford University Press 2003). John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War
History (New York: Oxford University Press 1997). John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New
History (New York: Penguin Press 2005). Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet
Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press 2007). Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union,
and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang 2007). Particular attention should also be drawn to
the ‘Cold War International History Project’ (CWIHP). The CWIHP, which is based at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, ‘seeks to accelerate the
process of integrating new sources, materials and perspectives from the former ‘‘Communist
bloc’’ and other countries into Cold War historiography’. See 5http://www.cwihp.org4.
2 For example, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New
York: Oxford University Press 1995). James E. Cronin, The World the Cold War Made:
Order, Chaos and the Return of History (London: Routledge 1996). Michael E. Latham,
Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy
Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 2000). Nils Gilman, Mandarins of
the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press 2004). Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to
Globalization (London: Routledge 2004). Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea:
Koreans, Americans and the Making of Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press 2007).
3 Henry Kissinger, June 1969, cited in Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the
Nixon White House (New York: Summit 1983) p.263. More generally see Jeremi Suni, Henry
Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2007).
4 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press 1987).
5 Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the
Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, KS: University Press of Kentucky 2006).
Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War
(New York: Cambridge University Press 2007).
6 Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1985). Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third
World: United States Foreign Policy 1945–1980 (New York: Pantheon Press 1988). Enrico
Augelli and Craig Murphy, America’s Quest for Supremacy and the Third World: A
Gramscian Analysis (London: Pinter 1988). Fred Halliday, Cold War, Third World: An Essay
on Soviet American Relations (London: Hutchinson Radius 1989). Zachary Karabell,
Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–1962
(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press 1999). Stephen G. Rabe, The Most
Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin
America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 1999).
7 The term ‘Third World’ (‘Tiers Monde’) was used by Sauvy in an article published in the
French magazine L’Observateur on 14 August 1952.
126 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

8 On the Bandung Conference, see Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955: Non-alignment and Afro-
Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet 2005).
9 On the Soviet Union and the Third World see Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The
World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic
Books 2005). Jerry F. Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and
American Options (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution 1986). Rajan Menon, Soviet
Power and the Third World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1986).
10 Roger D. Hansen, Beyond the North–South Stalemate (New York: McGraw-Hill 1979).
11 Mark T. Berger, ‘The End of the ‘‘Third World’’?’ in Michael Cox (ed.) Twentieth Century
International Relations, Volume VII: The Rise and Fall of the Third World (London: Sage
2007) pp.327–45: this is a reprinted version of Mark T. Berger, ‘The End of the ‘‘Third
World’’?’, Third World Quarterly 15/2 (1994) pp.257–4. Also see Mark T. Berger, ‘After the
Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism’, Third World Quarterly 25/1
(2004) pp.9–39; Mark T. Berger and Heloise Weber, Rethinking the Third World:
International Development and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008).
12 William Reno, ‘Congo: From State Collapse to ‘‘Absolutism’’, to State Failure’ in Mark T.
Berger (ed.) From Nation-Building to State Building (London: Routledge 2007). Denis M.
Tull, ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Militarized Politics in a ‘‘Failed State’’’ in
Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunn (eds.) African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 2007). For an historical overview see Robert B. Edgerton, The
Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2002).
13 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1996). Also see Mahmood Mamdani,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001).
14 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2001).
15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, revised edition 2006; first published 1983) p.xi.
16 G. John Ikenberry, ‘Creating Yesterday’s New World Order: Keynesian ‘‘New Thinking’’
and the Anglo-American Postwar Settlement’ in James Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane
(eds.) Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press 1993) p.57.
17 Nation-building also emerged as an important concern of North American political science in
the context of the Cold War and the rise of modernization theory. On this see Mark T. Berger,
‘Decolonization, Modernization and Nation-Building: Political Development Theory and the
Appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia 1945–1975’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34/
3 (2003) pp.421–48.
18 Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development (London: Palgrave, 2nd ed. 2001; first published 1997) p.177.
19 Robert Malley, The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1996).
20 Mark T. Berger, ‘Keeping the World Safe for Primary Colors: Area Studies, Development
Studies, International Studies and the Vicissitudes of Nation-Building’, Globalizations 4/4
(December 2007) pp.429–44.
21 ‘From Chaos, Order: Rebuilding Failed States’, The Economist, 5 March 2005, pp.45–7.
22 Mark T. Berger, ‘States of Nature and the Nature of States: The Fate of Nations, the Collapse
States and the Future of the World’, Third World Quarterly 28/6 (2007) pp.1203–14.
23 Douglas A. Borer, Superpowers Defeated: Afghanistan and Vietnam Compared (London:
Frank Cass 1999).
24 Vali Nasr, The Shi’a Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York:
W.W. Norton 2006).
25 Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World
Disorder (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2002; first published 1998) p.2.
26 Douglas A. Borer and Mark T. Berger, ‘All Roads Lead to and From Iraq: The Long War and the
Transformation of the Nation-State System’, Third World Quarterly 28/2 (2007) pp.197–215.