Analysis Of The Global Cold War By Odd Arne Westad

While exploring this book I was able to get a better understanding of how exactly the Cold War shaped the world I live in today. The book The Global Cold War by Odd Arne Westad covers a wide assortment of topics, the most prominent being how the Cold war was shaped, and how it has shaped the places we call home today. Overall, this book allowed the readers to get a better understanding of the Cold War in a more in-depth and global way. Within this book, the reader can see that the chapters are divided by topics instead of when the events took place. This allows for a more focused approach to what was happening and provides a difference from other books. As this book plays out Westad made it a point to show exactly how the third-world countries

America believed that if there was a country that was communist it shouldn’t be and that the American people should introduce them to Capitalism. This was an issue, because some countries were happy doing things the way they were, but they’ll “good” United States needed to swoop in and change that because they didn’t like it. This is how some of the third-world countries were forced into battles against their brothers. Nonetheless, the American people thought that what they believed in was right and that every other country should believe it and practice it as

The Soviets believed in Marxism and then slowly progressed to Stalinism. Over this period, Westad explains how the Soviets based their ideals of friendship on how close the beliefs of the other were to theirs. The Soviets also wanted to expand their empire and spread their ideals, just like the United States did. The Soviets wanted influence over third-world countries just as bad, “competition for influence in the Third World was an essential part of the existence of socialism”ⁱⁱ They needed to spread their ideals all over to make sure that they didn’t disappear in history forever. In general, it can be said that the Soviets just wanted to spread their culture, just as the United States wanted to. Once Westad explains the two superpowers’ ideologies he then switches the main theme over to how the third-world countries were created and affected. The third-world countries’ leaders all met in Bandung in the 1970s and talked about the war. Their ideologies had changed from wanting peace and friendship in the 1950s to now wanting to start a war with India. This had a large part to do with how the superpowers came in and changed their ways of thinking. Throughout the rest of the book, it continues to describe how the third-world countries changed, and how it affected the way they