What did the Cold War, that ongoing near-apocalypse, do to America? To the rest of the shaken world? What was meanly lost, what was nobly gained? How does all this prepare us for what lies ahead? It is difficult to think of questions that are more important to ask and more difficult to answer. Indeed, until now, nobody has truly addressed the real cost of America's Cold War, and how that long struggle set the stage for the tumultuous world we find ourselves living in at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The Fifty-Year Wound is the first book to show how an immediate regional crisis in the 1940s turned into a decades-long way of life for hundreds of millions of people across the globe. What emerged from all this shaped endings unthinkable when the challenge was set, raising unimagined issues that will not be settled for many years to come.
In Derek Leebaert's sweeping account, we follow the Cold War from start to finish, from suspicion to terror, from Berlin to Saigon to Beirut—and, more comically, from senatorial rhetoric to bureaucratic bungling. Leebaert explains how a struggle begun amid the ruins of Hitlerism was won an epoch later in its last, most dangerous moments and how the victory so gained nourishes great opportunities and terrible new dangers today.
Drawing upon U.S. and Russian sources only now coming to light, Leebaert challenges a range of widely believed "truths": from the assumptions Americans formed at the disordered start, to the origins and outcomes of the bloodletting of Korea and Vietnam, to the Cuban missile crisis, to the noisily acclaimed "détentes" with Russia and China, through arms race after arms race, to the dreamlike end. Spanning Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, The Fifty-Year Wound spectacularly illuminates the reality behind our commitments and entanglements. Leebaert takes us through trade wars and trade lies; high-tech marvels and fuzzy finance; poignant sacrifices and dirty compromises; and ceaseless face-off with the most powerful tyranny in all history. Many of the reputations of the most famous figures of this shadow age are reassessed; the often too passively accepted roles of elites and governments reexamined; and much of the ability of U.S. intelligence exposed to serious consideration. The result is the very best kind of history: a brilliant, innovative look backward that is also a vital roadmap to a startlingly different world.
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