The Struggle Against Imperialism: Anticolonialism and the Cold War

Judge and Langdon (The Cold War Through Documents: A Global History) have crafted an instructive, thorough history of 20th-century geopolitics that shows how the Cold War and third-world struggles against imperialism were “inextricably interconnected.” Each chapter focuses on a specific region and time period, and highlights how the United States and the Soviet Union used anti-imperial posturing to secure allies in an arms race and a lockdown on resources—that is, to pursue their own imperialistic aims. According to Judge and Langdon, both countries used their aid in third-world anticolonial movements—for example, the U.S.’s military support of Israel and the U.S.S.R.’s supplying weapons to Arab states—to promote their own agendas across the globe; meanwhile, the leaders of those anticolonial movements sought to promote their groups’ independence by playing the two major powers against each other, as when China, allied with the Soviets, entered into dialogue with U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1972. The book zooms in on specific third-world anti-imperial struggles, like the rise of Ho Chi Minh’s communism in Vietnam, Nassar’s Pan-Arab movement, and Chile’s Marxist wave. Judge and Langdon’s work yields a dense but fascinating ideological history of modern geopolitics. (June)