THE LOSING OF WWII:

Paul Thomas Chamberlin's new history of the Cold War puts this killing in a different light. Ambassador Dubs was a casualty of war--if not in a formal or legal sense, then as a matter of geopolitical reality. Rather than an aberration, his shooting affords an all too typical glimpse of a ghastly half-century of combat along the Asian frontier between liberal capitalism and revolutionary communism. In the forty-five years after the termination of World War II, twenty million people died in violent international conflicts and civil wars (19). Most of them were civilians, and their deaths followed a well-defined geography. The killing happened in wars with a close nexus to Cold War competition, and took place in an interconnected set of "bloodlands" that sprawled from Beirut in the west to Seoul and Pyongyang in the east, running through Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. What the historian John Lewis Gaddis famously called the "long peace" between the Soviet Union and the United States was, from the perspective of Asia's southern tier, as bloody as the First World War.   [...]

The methodology of following the bodies yields two basic insights into the architecture of Cold War violence. First, it had a distinct shape. Mass death was heavily concentrated along the fluid, postcolonial contact zone between the capitalist world and the two major Communist states, China and the Soviet Union. This physical expanse had been identified as a coherent territory in the middle of World War II by the director of the Yale Institute of International Studies, Nicholas Spykman, who called it "the rimland," and described it as "a vast buffer zone of conflict between sea power and land power" (44).  

In Spykman's estimate, control over these territories by a sea power--like the United States or Britain--would permit that power to encircle and dominate the "heartlands" of Russia and Eastern Europe. Spykman's rimland included much of the European subcontinent, but in Europe the heavily militarized and precisely demarcated national frontiers froze the superpower confrontation into a tense, but stable, standoff. Between Turkey and the eastern reaches of Asia, however, the collapse of formal and informal imperial power structures left room for open competition. And the paranoid, zero-sum logic that descended on the world capitals between 1945 and the start of the Korean War in 1950 militarized that competition, while also detaching it from any reasonably limited strategic aims. Vietnam or Afghanistan, if viewed through this lens, could take on almost incalculable significance, despite never having previously figured into the thinking of American diplomats. As Chamberlin puts it, "The horrors of the Second World War were over, but the wars of containment were just beginning" (46).  

The second, and perhaps the more interesting, feature of Chamberlin's analysis is that Cold War killing had a temporal structure of its own, marked by three major "waves" of violence that do not perfectly correspond to existing narratives of the wider conflict. Chamberlin lets these waves shape his chronology, decisively downplaying some of the major episodes of superpower tensions (his index does not mention détente or the Bay of Pigs, for example) in order to pivot around successive bloodlettings between 1949-51, the early 1970s, and the mid-1980s. These waves began in northern China, swept south and west through Indonesia and South Asia, and culminated with an effort to instrumentalize Islam as a weapon of superpower struggle in a set of interconnected conflicts in the greater Middle East. As these waves crested and broke, the prospects of secular revolution rose and fell, and utopian socialism gave way to ethno-religious mobilizations.  

Mao Zedong's Communist Party was in the cockpit of the first spike in violence, which Chamberlin calls the "East Asian Offensive." Beginning with the Chinese Civil War and extending to Korea and Indochina, this offensive blended revolutionary socialist aspirations with the contested establishment of sovereign nations out of the Japanese and French empires. In 1945 and 1946 it seemed just barely possible that the long-simmering war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao's Chinese Communist Party could be papered over with some kind of political resolution. But what looked to Moscow and Washington like political differences were profound social ruptures, and civil war embroiled the Chinese countryside almost from the start. The violence was staggering. In 1949, Mao gave Stalin a progress report: "In three years of fighting, he boasted, the PLA had killed '5 million 590 thousand people.' Mao estimated that no more than 500,000 GMD forces remained" (98). In the most populous nation in the world, a revolutionary party had wrested the initiative from both Moscow and Washington, and won a transformative victory. 

The Chinese Communist Party's takeover demonstrated the potential of revolutionary violence to reshape Asia. Mao's example electrified left-wing movements across the region, terrified Washington, and gave Moscow a partner and competitor. With Korean and Indochinese revolutions perched on the edge of reproducing Mao's triumph, the Truman administration militarized its commitment to containment, propping up the French war in the south and pouring the full weight of American conventional arms into the Korean peninsula. Containment had been transformed from a watchful presence in Germany to the routine use of high-altitude strategic bombers against Korean cities. By 1954, millions had been killed to secure uneasy stalemates. One offensive was over, and its close brought a real and massive reduction in the scale of warfare. But the peace would not last long. By the early 1960s, a new wave of violence was cresting as communist revolution slipped further out of the control of either Moscow or Beijing.  

What Chamberlin labels the "Indo-Asian Bloodbaths of the Middle Cold War" (179) were far more complex and heterogeneous than the surge of revolution after 1945. This second wave of violence included the American phase of the war in Vietnam; the entanglement of Laos and Cambodia in that conflict, culminating in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime; the decimation of the Indonesian left-wing in a wave of political massacres in 1965; and Bangladesh's secession from Pakistan in 1971. The period began with the loftiest aspirations for revolution and ended in a morass of sectarian and ethnic violence that "killed more than six million people" and "demolished global Communist solidarity" (356).  

In its place, there arose a third wave of killing, the "Great Sectarian Revolts of the Late Cold War" (362). These conflicts arose from the direct repudiation of the futures promised by capitalist and socialist modernization. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan produced the most prolonged peak in the series of post-1945 conflicts; a grinding series of battles that lasted the entire decade of the 1980s and planted the immediate seeds of post-1990 conflict. While the ideological oppositions of the 1950s collapsed in exhaustion, the strategies of containment and revolution lumbered on, fueling a final desultory round of proxy warfare that turned the lands from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan into a seedbed of future crises.  

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