The socialist economic system in Eastern Europe—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—was established in 1949. Most of the countries there did not join the CMEA because they genuinely believed in its purpose of rivaling the capitalist half of Europe. Stalin forced in order to protect Soviet influence there. Yet even he seemed not to be convinced about the viability of the CMEA. Several socialist states opted out of the idea of an integrated socialist economic system within two decades—Yugoslavia, China, Albania, and Romania. Because the USSR was the dominant member, it initiated several rounds of reforms from the mid 1950s to the 1970s to provide the CMEA with greater purpose and direction in the competition with the capitalist West. But the structural and ideological foundations, which Stalin had put in place before 1953, remained remarkably resistant to change. Thus, within two decades of the end of Worl War II, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe turned from a source of reparations into an economic liability for the USSR. By the late 1970s, virtually all CMEA members understood that the organization had failed to deliver it had set out to do.

The Cold War did not cause the conflicts in the Middle East, particularly the one between Israel and the Arab states. The Zionist state building project rooted in the anti-Semitism of the emerging European nation states of the late 19th century, employed British imperialism as a vehicle, and derived its moral urgency from the Holocaust. But it triggered the Palestinian displacement. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported the UN partition proposal in 1947 and recognized Israel within a year. Still, they supported Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956. The United States was concerned about the possible growth of Soviet influence in the region, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Its joint effort with the United Kingdom to build up an anti-Soviet alliance system divided the Arab world while it alienated both Israel and Egypt. In the end, the pre-emptive anti-Soviet alliance making helped destabilize the Middle East and allowed the USSR to enter the region. Although the Suez Crisis terminated British imperial influence, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were able to benefit from it by making significant inroads in the following decade.

The end of the Soviet-American competition not only seemed to occur unexpectedly but also destroyed near-unshakable assumptions about the long-lasting nature of the Cold War. Structural change in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe had put in place the conditions, under which the superpower conflict could actually have ended by in the first half of the 1980s. But why, then, did the superpower conflict still take so long to end? Both superpowers were Cold Warriors almost until the very end. American-centric interpretations of a US victory in the Cold War to the contrary, the USSR decided to end it. Although the last Soviet leader originally sought to reform and strengthen the Soviet Union, by 1988 he realized that this goal was unattainable.

The Vatican was one of the seminal Cold Warriors, rejecting communism as early as the 1840s. It had hoped for the “containment” of Soviet-style expansionism into Europe during World War II, i.e. even before the United States adopted that term into its official Cold War vocabulary in 1946-47. However, the Vatican realized by the late 1950s that ideological rigidity damaged its own interest—ensuring the continued existence of functional churches behind the Iron Curtain. Mainly for this reason, it decided to engage with the communist world in the 1960s, although its policies were fraught with political danger and disappointments. Its major success in the European Cold War—the restoration of the Polish Church to independence—only occurred in the context of détente in German-German and European affairs in the early 1970s.

The Socialist Camp was a Soviet creation. In the wake of the Soviet military advance across the eastern half of Europe in World War II, Stalin’s USSR imposed communist regimes. As the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Union tightened controls in 1947-48, alienating Yugoslavia in process but also attracting the communist parties from China and Albania. The Socialist Camp appeared sturdy but was internally brittle. After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors tried to regain legitimacy by reforming the USSR. De-Stalinization opened up rifts with China, Romania, and Albania, and created political crises in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The rise of a conservative Soviet leadership in the mid 1960s did not smother conflict within the Socialist Camp but ultimately convinced the USSR to shore up a rump-camp through military means. The intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the erosion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, but undermined the capacity of the Soviet system to reform itself. It further alienated other socialist states like China, Romania, and Yugoslavia while convincing Western European communist parties to reform themselves into democratic organizations.

The three Great Powers at the end of World War II and the two superpowers after the mid 1960s experienced tight limits to their political, economic and military power. They were usually most successful if they were able to influence pre-existing regional developments. Particularly the Middle East defied outside influence. Conflicts and developments usually fell into one of three categories: those without Cold War roots, those dating back to the Bolshevik challenge of 1917, and those caused by the Cold War after World War II. Over the course of four decades until the late 1980s, they collectively affected structural change. However, middle powers and smaller agents enjoyed different levels of agency, ranging from much influence, like communist China, to minute, like the Palestinians. Yet, in general, agency steadily increased over the course of the Cold War.

Almost a decade ago, when I attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in Berlin, the narrative structure of this book emerged before my eyes. Wagner’s idea of a network of stories that intersect and influence each other has fascinated me since the early 1990s when I first saw the complete performance of his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Its second part, Die Walküre, sparked my vision of writing a reinterpretation of the Cold War as an interconnected set of narratives that focuses on how middle and smaller actors at the regional level shaped that global conflict.

At the end of World War II, the Big Three agreed on Germany’s territorial reduction and division, and the territorial westward relocation of Poland. Poland received the German territories of southern East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with the Oder and Neisse rivers forming its new western border. The Big Three also decided to divide the remainder of Germany into occupation zones—a decision that, however, predetermined the country’s divided fate until 1990. At their birth in 1949, both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were firmly convinced that the nation’s division would be temporary. The Korean War cemented the nation’s division. Afterwards, West Germany tried to prevent East Germany’s attempt at seeking separate statehood. The East German closure of the borders in the divided capital Berlin in 1961 deepened the division. Starting in late 1969, West Germany acknowledged the reality of the two German states but denied the existance of two German nations. Although recognition in 1972-73 had been a long-term goal of the GDR, it also brought the danger of economic and political embracement by the FRG.

Non-Alignment also was a creation of India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, though Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser established the movement of bloc-free status in the Cold War, by 1961. Unlike Asian-African Internationalism, Non-Alignment attracted a large number of sub-Saharan African states. In 1961-1965, Non-Alignment developed into the antagonist of Asian-African internationalism, particularly in the context of China’s radicalized policies towards the Afro-Asian world. But victory in this struggle still left Non-Alignment deeply shaken. The June War in 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbors further taxed the movement’s internal unity and political raison d’être, since the founding member Egypt was one of the belligerents in a conflict in which the superpower blocs lined up behind the two warring sides. The Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia the following year forced Tito to pull back from instituting Non-Aligned collaboration with the Socialist Camp. Yet, against the background of the ongoing Indochina conflict, Non-Alignment still sided increasingly with the Socialist Camp in the first half of the 1970s, undermining its own purpose in the long term.

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the two halves of divided Europe overcame their parallel economic crises. Ballooning Eastern European debt to the non-socialist world, the Polish Crisis in 1980-81, and the economic impact of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq-Iran War permanently undermined Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. By late 1981, the USSR had neither the economic means nor the military stomach to maintain its influence by brute force. As a consequence, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany turned to the western world for credit and economic advice, which in turn accelerated the erosion of Soviet dominance. At the same time, western countries underwent a conservative transformation that partially helped to overcome the economic crises of the late 1970s that had emerged in the aftermath of the American abolition of the Bretton Woods system and the two Middle East oil shocks. In the 1980s, they emerged strengthened in economy terms and unified against the final Soviet attempt to seek supremacy in all of Europe through the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Europe. The structures for the end of the regional Cold War were in place.

The Chinese civil war 1927-49 was the first regional Cold War conflict. It pitted the internationally recognized Republican government of the Nationalist Party against the Chinese Communist Party. Although by 1945 China was elevated to great power status as a member of the United Nation Security Council, it was internally weak. Neither the nationalists nor the communists had significantly contributed to the end of imperialism in China by 1945. With the Nationalist defeat in 1949, the communists provided the country with a stable government for the first time in a century. However, during the following quarter of a century, their leaders were unable to agree on external and domestic policies. Should China aim at revolutionizing the international system, or seek a place in it through membership in the United Nations? Should the PRC introduce a utopian socialist society at home, or pursue sound socio-economic development policies? The failures of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the successes of capitalist Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, and PRC membership in the United Nations eventually convinced Chinese leaders to forego revolution by the 1970s.

At the end of World War II, three countries dominated the world. Though declining, the United Kingdom sought to preserve its global empire. The cautious Soviet Union acted as a rising revolutionary power. The reformist United States aimed at decolonization and the restoration of prosperity under its own leadership. The world’s Cold War division emerged in the next dozen years. Ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions divided Europe and East Asia in the late 1940s. The outbreak of Korean War—a local conflict at the world’s periphery—in 1950 triggered American alliance building around the communist world, including the People’s Republic of China. As the United States completed its ring of containment from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and South East Asia to the East Asian rim by 1955, the post-Stalin Soviet Union tried to relax Cold War tensions, but without much success. The Suez Crisis, which was partially triggered by British imperial pretensions, opened the Middle East to the Cold War, undermined British global standing, damaged American interests, and presented the Soviet Union with an unexpected triumph in the global Cold War.

The decade after 1964 witnessed two major cataclysmic conflicts—the June War in 1967 and the October War in 1973. Since 1964, American and Soviet influence in the Middle East was growing while the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors deepened, leading to June War in 1967 and the subsequent three-year Israeli-Arab stalemate. As the Socialist Camp and Free World lined up behind the Arab side and Israel, respectively, in the June War, the global Cold War superimposed itself on the preexisting regional conflict. Until the fall of 1970, superpower antagonism supported local actors in buttressing the Israeli-Arab stalemate. Egypt’s decision to seek a unilateral arrangement with Israel in late 1970 required the prior weakening of Soviet influence in the region. Thus, while Middle Eastern countries had enticed the superpowers to permeate the region in the second half of the 1960s, one of regional actors—Egypt—took active steps to push one of the hegemons and, in the process, the Cold War out of the region again. When Cairo was unable to engage Washington diplomatically, it decided to go to war in October 1973 to force the Middle East conflict onto the American agenda.

Nuclear weapons secured status in international affairs throughout the Cold War. The USSR and the United Kingdom acquired them to retain a status equal to the United States after 1945. By the 1960s, the United States and the USSR formed a nuclear superpower duopoly, while the United Kingdom lost its status due to its financial shortages. The PRC, Israel, and France embarked on nuclear projects in the mid-1950s to acquire respect from the USSR, the United States, regional rivals, or any combination thereof. By the late 1950s, Washington and Moscow grew concerned about nuclear proliferation and took action to impose an international non-proliferation regime in the 1960s. Still, China’s first successful test in October 1964 triggered India’s decision to go nuclear in an attempt to restore equal status, which in turn convinced Pakistan to seek nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s, the two superpowers negotiated on the limitation of their nuclear arsenals but still remained in a class of nuclear powers by themselves. With the NATO double-track decision of 1979, West Germany recommitted the United States to Western Europe’s security through the establishment of a regional nuclear deterrent.