Editor's Note

Abstract

The term “global Cold War” has become fashionable over the past two decades. Scholars who use the term, including many who submit manuscripts to the Journal of Cold War Studies, evidently believe that inserting the adjective “global” enhances our understanding of what the Cold War was. In reality, the simpler phrase “Cold War” is sufficient. During most of the time the Cold War lasted, it was a global phenomenon and was perceived as such. The notion that scholars in the 1970s and later decades focused exclusively on the United States and the Soviet Union and ignored the rest of the world is absurd. Both before and after 1989, scholarly analyses of the Cold War took ample account of the East-West conflict’s global scope. Hence, the addition of “global” in “global Cold War” is redundant, roughly equivalent to calling water “wet water” or fire “hot fire.” The Cold War began in Europe at the end of World War II with the division of the continent, especially the division of Germany, and it soon spread to Northeast Asia with the division of the Korean peninsula, the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and the deepening of territorial disputes between Japan and the Soviet Union. Cold War tensions also quickly spread into the Middle East, where the formation of Israel in 1948, the rise of Arab nationalist governments in Egypt, Syria, and other countries, and the huge importance of the region for global energy supplies became catalysts for East-West conflict. The impact of key events in the Middle East from the 1950s through the 1970s—the Suez crisis of 1956, the Iraqi revolution of 1958, and Arab-Israeli wars in 1967, 1970–1971, and 1973—was greatly exacerbated by the Cold War. The Islamic revolution in Iran in early 1979, the subsequent wave of Islamic radicalism throughout the region, and the decision by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to go to war against Iran in 1980—a war that lasted eight years and killed hundreds of thousands—complicated the situation and necessitated realignments, but the Middle East remained a prime arena of superpower competition for the duration of the Cold War. Elsewhere in the world, the spread of the Cold War was facilitated by the process of decolonization and the breakup of European colonial empires in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Even though decolonization and the Cold War were separate phenomena, they greatly influenced each other at every stage. Decolonization created opportunities for the Soviet Union and other Communist states, especially the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Cuba, East Germany, and North Korea, to provide weapons, training, and financing to Communist guerrilla forces that were striving to end colonial rule and gain power. The United States, for its part, supported antiCommunist governments in former colonial areas as they waged counterinsurgency campaigns against Soviet-backed guerrillas. These developments, and the seizure of