cover image The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War

Norman Stone. Basic, 35 (640pp) ISBN 978-0-465-02043-0

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. (June 1)