It is no exaggeration to say that the Cold War formed the crucible out of which a new system of radicalized Third World states emerged. The decades following 1945 brought an end to a five-hundred-year era of European colonial expansion. As the Great Powers of Europe retreated, two successor empires battled for control of the postimperial world order. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union sought to reconstruct the colonialism of the previous era, but both hoped that their respective sociopolitical systems would dominate the new age. The Cold War that their rivalry created generated violence throughout much of the world—nowhere more than Eurasia’s southern tier. But even as the superpower struggle dominated world affairs, an array of regional challengers appeared in this Eurasian rimland to contest the Cold War paradigm with both words and arms. These local revolts—focused around but reaching far beyond Beijing, Hanoi, and Tehran—pulled the front lines of the Cold War into the developing world and, in doing so, fundamentally altered the landscape of international affairs as the twentieth century drew to a close.
The East Asian offensive tore through China, Korea, and Indochina between 1945 and 1954 and announced the stunning rise of the global Communist movement as a very real contender for world power in the wake of the Second World War. But the anchors of this movement, Moscow and Beijing, proved unable to hold their alliance together. During the second wave of mass violence, between 1961 and 1979, global communism collapsed. The series of wars in Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Bangladesh that ravaged South and Southeast Asia laid waste to Communist solidarity in Asia and ended three decades of Marxist victories in Asia. But even as the Asian Communist revolution fell into ruin, a new breed of revolutionaries stepped forward to continue the battle for the Third World. The Cold War’s third wave of mass violence consumed the central Islamic world between 1975 and 1990, as ethno-religious warriors emerged as the new face of revolution in Lebanon, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Washington’s decades-long war against communism crippled secular liberation movements throughout much of the Third World. In doing so, U.S. Cold War policies helped to destroy the principal alternative to ethnosectarian politics in much of the postcolonial world. American leaders believed that their battle against left-wing revolutionaries would leave liberal capitalism as the only viable political alternative. They were mistaken. By the last decades of the Cold War, a new generation of fighters chose to embrace ethnic and religious violence as a means of staging Third World revolution. Moreover, even after the Iranian Revolution, U.S. officials believed that they could harness the power of religious warriors such as the Mujahideen in the Cold War struggle against communism. Only after the end of the superpower struggle did American leaders realize that they had helped unleash a creature they could not now control.
Throughout the post-1945 era, the Americans courted authoritarians and religious forces as bulwarks against communism. In one case after another, U.S. leaders prioritized anticommunism over democracy in their Third World allies. At the same time, Soviet and Chinese Third World policies pulled postcolonial revolutionaries away from moderate socialism and toward more radical forms of Marxist thought. The East Asian offensive left a string of highly militarized Communist regimes and authoritarian dictatorships in places such as Beijing, Taipei, Pyongyang, Seoul, Hanoi, and Saigon. Likewise, the Indo-Asian bloodbaths bolstered military regimes in Hanoi, Saigon, Jakarta, Phnom Penh, and Islamabad as the Americans, Soviets, and Chinese poured resources into local conflicts. And the wars of the great sectarian revolt helped radicalize militant groups in Lebanon, Iran, and Afghanistan while simultaneously strengthening militarized regimes in Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. In this way, U.S. and Soviet military, political, and financial support for conflicts raging throughout the postcolonial world helped destroy moderates and radicalize societies around the world.
The fallout from the ravaging of the Third World went largely overlooked in Washington and Moscow. As the superpower confrontation wound down, both Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush envisioned a new, post–Cold War world. While Gorbachev hoped to see the integration of the Soviet Union into the global order, Bush had other ideas. On September 11, 1990—eleven years to the day before the 9/11 attacks—the president appeared before Congress to herald the dawn of the New World Order and call for united action against the recent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Though Bush spoke of cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, he outlined a vision of an American-dominated, liberal-capitalist international order. Bush’s ideas resonated with most Americans for whom the lessons of the Cold War were clear. The free world and the Communist bloc had squared off in a head-to-head confrontation, and liberal capitalism had prevailed. History was marching inexorably toward an interconnected global order in which liberal-capitalist ideas would reign supreme. This idea, articulated most clearly by political theorist Francis Fukuyama, gained traction among Americans celebrating their ostensible victory in the Cold War. Americans both inside and outside government looked forward to a new era of American predominance, a unipolar world order in which the United States would stand as the unchallenged superpower.
But some scholars, such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, warned of a coming “clash of civilizations” in which ideological struggles would be replaced by conflicts between so-called civilizations. Journalist Robert Kaplan warned of a “coming anarchy” bred of environmental collapse, disease, and resurgent tribalism. Meanwhile, historian John Lewis Gaddis suggested that the world might come to miss the “long peace” created by the Cold War’s stalemate. Together, these thinkers argued that the Cold War had held back the tide of religious and ethnic strife. Now, with the superpower bulwarks removed, those violent forces were set to burst forth upon the world. Despite Huntington, Lewis, and Kaplan’s dire warnings, the world experienced an overall decrease in the level of violence after 1990. Certain places, such as the former Yugoslavia, became more violent. But even Iraq, a nation that experienced two U.S. invasions, a decade of harsh sanctions, and years of brutal civil war, suffered more casualties on a yearly basis during the Iran-Iraq War than in the quarter century following 1990. Far from restraining conflict, the superpower confrontation actually fueled greater violence around the world. With the exceptions of Yugoslavia and sub-Saharan Africa, which was devastated by the Rwandan genocide and the horrifically violent and largely ignored Second Congo War, the post–Cold War world was a more peaceful place.
Indeed, for hundreds of millions of people in the Third World, the lessons of the preceding fifty years were not so straightforward, and the distinction between pre- and post-1990-era violence was not so clear. For societies across much of the non-Western world, the Cold War age was marked by vicious massacres and resurgent ethnic and sectarian strife. A half century of conflict radicalized societies throughout the postcolonial world and left an array of heavily militarized states and rebel groups across the globe. Moreover, American victories in the Cold War largely blocked secular, left-wing revolution as a viable path toward progress in the developing world. Despite these ostensible victories, Washington’s image as a benevolent superpower had also been badly tarnished by episodes such as the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra scandal, and decades of support for Third World authoritarian regimes. Likewise, the prospect of unchallenged American military, economic, and cultural domination held little appeal for large segments of the world. It was therefore hardly surprising that aspiring revolutionaries in the post–Cold War world rejected U.S. supremacy and looked elsewhere for political inspiration.
Nor was it a coincidence that most of the largest conflict zones after 1990 were Cold War–era battlefields. The most immediate challenge to Bush’s New World Order came from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which launched an invasion of Kuwait in 1990, prompting the first of two American invasions. Initially lauded as victories, America’s wars neutralized Iraq’s ability to counterbalance Iranian power and transformed Iraq into a haven for jihadist groups. Like Cold War–era presidents before him, George W. Bush bought into the myth of a monolithic enemy. Where the fiction of the Communist monolith had led Washington into misguided conflicts during the Cold War, the fear of coordination between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad steered the United States into a second, disastrous war in Iraq. And just as the notion of the Kremlin’s total control over world communism often blinded U.S. leaders to tensions among Communist governments such as Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi, the myth of a unified global jihadist movement masked deep rifts between revolutionary forces in the post–Cold War world. The ethnosectarian revolutionaries of the late Cold War emerged out of a common set of circumstances, but they pursued a very different set of goals.
Like Iraq, many twenty-first-century battlefields were places where the United States won significant Cold War victories. Washington’s ostensible victory in Korea ushered in an era of high tension along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel that would last well into the next century as the Communist regime in North Korea maintained an iron grip on power, built nuclear weapons, and threatened a renewed war against Seoul. Likewise, the theocratic regime in Iran, itself a product of blowback from Cold War schemes, survived and focused on developing nuclear weapons and projecting its influence across the region by funding militant Shia groups such as Hezbollah. Meanwhile, neighboring Afghanistan slipped into a state of near anarchy after 1990 as rival warlords fielded weapons left over from the Soviet war to battle for control of the country. In 1994, a new rebel group led by former religious students calling themselves the Taliban was gaining ground in a series of offensives that would soon carry them to Kabul. In each case, Washington’s Cold War victories laid the foundations for later foreign policy challenges. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and Kaplan’s “coming anarchy,” then, were not the result of the Cold War’s denouement but rather the fruits of the Cold War itself.
Paradoxically, the engineer of America’s greatest defeat during the Cold War, Vietnam, became an important partner after 1990. Beginning in 1991, leaders in Washington and Hanoi pursued a rapprochement that would leave the two nations as unlikely allies in the face of the rising power of China. Beijing’s post–Cold War policies suggested that the Communist giant viewed its Nixon-era rapprochement with Washington as a strategic convenience. After 1990, Beijing moved closer to post-Soviet Russia and continued its decades-long quest to expand its influence in world affairs, slowly extending its influence over the South China Sea, building its military capabilities, and sending advisors to countries across the developing world. Meanwhile, Washington’s greatest Cold War victory, the supposed defeat of the Soviet Union, did not lead to a lasting rapprochement between Washington and Moscow. By late 1999, a former KGB operative controlled the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin seemed intent on restoring the glory of Moscow’s empire, undermining NATO, and using Russia’s formidable military to threaten the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine and expand Moscow’s influence in the Middle East.
Ultimately, the chaos of the post–Cold War world dashed American hopes that the rest of the world would accept Washington’s much-trumpeted victory in the superpower struggle. Rather, the violence and upheavals of the post–Cold War international order grew out of a different history, one rooted in southern Asia’s liberation wars. The destructive dynamics that the superpower struggle helped unleash in the Third World outlived the Cold War and sowed the seeds for a new generation of conflicts in the twenty-first century. On balance, these conflicts have remained less bloody than their Cold War counterparts. Nevertheless, new rivalries among the United States, Russia, and China threaten to resurrect the proxy-style wars of an earlier era.
The half century after the end of World War II fundamentally transformed the world. For the United States, Europe, and Russia, the Cold War effectively defeated the Marxist revolutionary challenge and left capitalism as the reigning political-economic system. But events played out very differently in the Third World. There, the Cold War helped destroy European colonialism, creating dozens of independent states at the same time that it fueled mass violence that killed more than twenty million people and gutted the forces of moderate secular nationalism. Ultimately, both stories are critical to understanding the Cold War era and the twenty-first-century international order. The ferocious violence of the Cold War’s killing fields was every bit as central to the making of the contemporary world as Europe’s long peace.