LAUSR

Middle East (p. 565). Fundamentally, Westad’s interest in the end of the Cold War is different than much existing scholarship. Rather than ask why the Cold War ended, Westad is much more interested in answering the question of with what legacies the Cold War left us. There are, however, several ways in which The Cold War could have offered even more to its readers. Midway through the book, Westad broadens his lens geographically. Whereas much of the first half of the book explored the domestic politics and international relations of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and European powers, in the second half he turns to examining the Cold War in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. At this point, Westad shifts to chapters organised by geography rather than chronology, which means that we read about Eisenhower in Lebanon after learning about Nixon’s visit to China. Such a juxtaposition may present a challenge to more general readers. Given that the book’s structure reveals the author’s conception of the Cold War, he might have more explicitly explained this choice and its advantages to his readers. Similarly, the subtitle of The Cold War is A World History. For the benefit of his scholarly readers, Westad might have explained what is gained by adopting a world-history approach as opposed to those of international history or transnational history. Westad’s chapter on India hinges around 1971. Although he does not assert this explicitly, the chronological centre of many of his later chapters suggests he sees the 1970s as a key decade for the conflict. Yet, Westad argues that it was in the 1970s that the Cold War seemed ‘an entrenched international system’ (p. 475). He might therefore have said more about to what extent the Cold War was either ‘transformed’ or ‘shocked’ by the decade. Finally, Westad frames the Cold War as the high point of conflict between two socio-economic systems, ‘the market’ and ‘the plan’, but he also writes about the Cold War as a system itself: ‘the last great international system’ (pp. 2 and 4). In the end, it is complicated to conceive of the Cold War both as a clash of two systems and as a system itself. I wished the author had distinguished between these different uses of the term. Just as Global Cold War reshaped the study of that conflict, broadening its scope in terms of focus, actors, and sources, so too will The Cold War redirect the work of many in the field. Seasoned scholars and budding graduate students will similarly be inspired by The Cold War to expand the chronological lens of their research or reconsider the conflict in other fruitful ways.