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For a long time, the study of the Cold War meant, could only mean, the study of confrontation. Conceived as a confrontation between two incompatible socio-economic systems, the cold war became, in the analysis of its interpreters, a series of conflicts, close calls, and subversive actions. The metaphor chosen by George Orwell and popularized by Walter Lippmann, it seemed, dictated the analytical focus of interpreters and scholars of the period. The Cold War confirmed itself in Berlin, China, and Korea, in McCarthyite politics and Stalinist repression. Cuba was its apotheosis; events there gave meaning to a discourse on bipolarity that American leaders used to win elections and discipline the free world they led, and that bestowed on the USSR a standing its economy could not underwrite. Here was the battle at its existentially clearest. A free people were under threat of subjugation, and humanity's beacon of freedom would make a stand--whether for liberty or justice depended on what "camp" you belonged to.1Its missile-fueled denouement was as clear and intelligible a narrative as the best of the Spaghetti Westerns Hollywood produced.
What allowed, and indeed required this focus on confrontation was the idea of autarky as the sine qua non of the Soviet socio-economic system. This encouraged a political study of the confrontation that subsumed capitalism itself as a dependent, constitutive category of the much larger schema that was the Cold War. The Soviet Union was understood to be an intentionally autarkic system that set itself up as an alternative to capitalism and that after World War II challenged the capitalist order first in Europe and then globally.2Later, in the midst of a social backlash against the Vietnam War, a small group of historians "revised" some of these assumptions and centered the debate on the global depredations of American foreign policy and its collusion with capital. Any focus on economy would necessarily downgrade bipolarity and ignore a superpower whose economic imprint on the world was mostly absent. But in accepting the idea of the Soviet Union as a universe apart, a place of opposition to the liberal world order, these revisionists missed a chance to analyze in depth the relationship between the Cold War and the...