No Spark in Cold War

The Atlantic and its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War

The second half began in the wreckage of the first, with the almost complete destruction of the country whose recovery was to be a major theme of the following 50 years.

“Germany had had the fate of Genesis’ Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire,” Stone writes. “Two out of five boys born between 1915 and 1925 were dead or missing. The 10 million surviving Wermacht men were herded into makeshift camps behind barbed wire and another 10 million non-Germans, released from the camps or from forced labour, were wandering around.”

At the same time, Japan was devastated, a civil war was developing in China and Stalin was setting out to restore the old Tsarist empire, starting with the communist takeover of what came to be known as Eastern Europe. An iron curtain, as Churchill observed, was coming down across Europe while, in the US, a generation of GIs were returning to their homeland to disenfranchise the Rosie the Riveter women who had kept the home front working while their menfolk fought in Europe.

Not that the travel by Americans was one-way. A bunch of bright executives came to Europe to install what Stone regards as a version of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the shattered continent: the Marshall Plan. Stalin denounced the Marshall Plan as a plot by which imperialists could take over weak economies, thereby depriving countries like Czechoslovakia of the boost which returned West Germany to its former status as a great industrial power.

But, according to Stone, the Marshall Plan was much more than a gesture by the victors towards the recovery of the vanquished. It was an instrument in the creation of the EU which, he suggests, was the American intention from early on, when the Americans began to preach the virtues of a big, unified market.

“Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, knew his Europe from the old days,” Stone points out, “when he had been an international banker, and said that unification was ‘an absolute necessity’. More, the Americans lost patience with national currencies and said there should be a common one.”

Even though men like Jean Monnet (an opportunist, in Stone’s view) saw the potential in European unity, Britain took an attitude to the emerging Europe which, from the outset, was obstructive.

“Britain, with still strong imperial or ex-imperial connections, with exports booming, with an important position in Atlantic affairs and a sizeable force fighting in Korea, had solid interests elsewhere, and in 1951 very few people took developments in Europe with the seriousness that they, in hindsight, merited. No one in 1950 foresaw the rapidity with which England would decline.”

Stone’s reputation has been largely built on the pugnacity of his oppositional stances, and so the reader comes to this latest mammoth history with some anticipation of an over-arching view which will change how one views the latter half of the 20th. The title of the book reflects a view of the USA, Britain and a handful of allies, as “the Atlantic world” which he portrays as having been on the defensive, post-war, as the communist nations seemed in the ascendant. That was to change when the USSR came apart, when Russia and its satellites embraced capitalism, and when China managed to embrace capitalism while claiming undiluted commitment to Mao’s brand of socialism.

The Atlantic and its Enemies is described in a sub-title as a “personal history of the Cold War”, which would explain the arbitrary selection of data presented in the sizeable volume. Stone pays little or no attention to figures like Wernher von Braun, a key figure in the creation of the rockets which terrified Londoners during the Blitz (although the numbers killed by his outrageously expensive creations were relatively small). His active collusion in a murderous slave labour camp which supported his research was speedily laundered, post-war, by an America eager to harness his genius for the space war. Nor does he spend time on McCarthyism with its attendant high-profile career casualties. He is more interested in economics and the process by which nations trade, develop and threaten each other. Perhaps because of his academic background, the end result is one of those impregnably dense books shot through with references which assume such knowledge on the part of the reader as to be reminiscent of Helen Keller’s mentor, Annie Sullivan, who complained that you had to know how to spell a word before you could look up how to spell it in a dictionary.

Stone’s earlier work, notably his eponymous history of the Eastern Front, 1914-1917, was exemplary in its clarity and capacity to engage non-academic readers. This latest book, in sharp contrast, manages to be at once dense and trivial, with adulatory references to some individuals who never – within the text – live up to his praise, and contemptuous shorthand dismissals of others. Following the narrative is constantly hampered by his obsession with irrelevant side issues, such as his mention (for no obvious reason) of Pearl S Buck’s novel about the life of the Chinese peasant in the 1930s, which won the Nobel Prize.

“However,” he parenthetically adds, “a New York wit wrote, not inaccurately, that of the seven American Nobels for literature, five had been alcoholics, the sixth a drunk and the seventh Pearl S Buck.”

The point being? The wit manifest how? This side-swipe is typical of the inconsequential distractions peppering an otherwise dull, if detailed, journey through a period of recent history which, to those of us who lived through it, seemed a hell of a lot more interesting than Stone makes it, retrospectively.