Book review: The Cold War’s hidden hands
Alfred McCoy’s sweeping history of covert intervention places authoritarian Taiwan within a global pattern, even if his vision of a new Cold War proves less convincing
By David Frazier / Contributing reporter
Alfred McCoy has been a thorn in the side of the CIA at the very least since 1972, when he published The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a book the agency tried — and failed — to kill.
Now, with his latest, The Cold War on Five Continents, McCoy continues to hammer the CIA for its crimes of the Cold War, including anti-democratic political assassinations, coups and other covert foreign interventions. At the same time, he also presents a startlingly novel analysis of the Cold War itself — this is most of the book, and it’s great — and a less good prediction for the advent of a new Cold War.
Taiwan is mentioned only a few times in the book, but McCoy’s grand narrative of the late 20th century has big implications for the country. It allows us to consider the nation’s post-World War II history against broader trends, and shows this history to be less unique than is often assumed.
The Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage, by Alfred McCoy.
McCoy’s theory of the Cold War goes something like this. The 40 or so years following World War II combined two defining historical moments, the Cold War and the era of decolonization. These overlapped almost perfectly.
As scores of new nations stepped out from under the yolk of colonialism to be born in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Eastern Europe, two major powers — the Western liberal bloc led by the USA and the Communist bloc led by the USSR — vyed to bring them into their respective folds. It was a geopolitical competition for influence, and the superpowers played it by carving up the globe.
But with the horrors of World War II fresh in the world memory, there was little appetite for “hot war.” There were a few exceptions of course — Korea and Vietnam for the US, Afghanistan for the USSR.
But on the whole, the superpowers preferred covert operations — espionage, insurgencies and secret wars. (Think: Laos, Angola, Congo, Nicaragua). These types of interventions were much cheaper, didn’t kill off hometown boys and there was no moral backlash as long as the news stayed in the back pages.
The chaotic milieu of new nations — which especially from the late 1940s to the 1960s mixed nationalists, democrats, communists and warlords — was perfect for the deployment of covert operatives, or spies.
McCoy calls these “men on the spot,” an archetype he models on 19th century solo agents like T.E. Lawrence, or “Lawrence of Arabia,” and James Brooke, the “White Raja of Sarawak.” One could also imagine Joseph Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz or Lord Jim.
Such men were parachuted into local, factional conflicts and, based on their personal wiles, often managed to win the day for one empire or another.
Characterizing these men on the spot as “ambitious, cunning and often amoral,” McCoy identifies around three dozen such Cold War operatives, from French military officer Roger Trinquier, who pioneered methods of counter-insurgency in Indochina in the late 1940s, to US marine Oliver North, who ended his career at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.
Such covert actors often fueled what were essentially civil wars — though in the new Cold War terminology, they were labeled anti-communist or anti-imperialist insurgencies--with arms, cash and secret directives from Washington or Moscow.
The pity here is that each of McCoy’s spy stories offers a potential thriller, but he is so ploddingly deadpan in the telling. Mainly, we are left with a history lesson.
As the superpowers squared off throughout the third world, McCoy argues that the US found it much easier to achieve its political goals by backing “absolute monarchies, dictatorships and juntas,” as long as they were reliably pro-Western.
The pattern was perhaps predicted by US president Franklin D Roosevelte, who, after having backed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1939, is supposed to have said, “He may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.”
For Washington, autocrats were often easier to deal with. Democracies, by comparison, were messier and far less predictable.
So the US, in large part through the CIA, funded dictators who ruled with iron fists, jailed and killed their political opponents and in many cases operated death squads. Cumulative death tolls ran up into the millions.
Many of these Cold War autocracies however came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union split apart, a series of “people power” revolutions sprung up across the globe, spurring their downfall. The US Congress also became far less tolerant of anti-democratic rulers and the CIA’s dirty tricks.
In this new climate, repressive regimes from the Philippines to Eastern Europe suddenly fell apart. With varying degrees of success, they were replaced by democracies.
These overarching trends were geographically dispersed and remarkable in their variety. The way McCoy weaves them together is extraordinary.
Taiwan’s Cold War history is not specifically described, but it fits McCoy’s pattern almost perfectly. (McCoy probably found Taiwan less interesting, as the country didn’t contain rival superpower proxies fighting it out.)
Following Taiwan’s decolonization from Japan at the end of World War II, the US backed an authoritarian ruler Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). Then Washington stuck with his regime through 38 years of martial law, largely turning a blind eye to the human rights abuses of the White Terror.
Taiwan’s martial law came to an end in 1987 — right at the tail end of the Cold War and marking the twilight of what some would call the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) colonization of the country. Domestic democracy movements were key in pushing this change.
Viewed in McCoy’s framework, it becomes easy to place Chiang alongside other US-supported dictators like Mobotu in the Congo (then called Zaire), Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia’s General Suharto.
It also reminds us that Taiwan’s democratic era arrived in the same wave with the Philippines’ People Power Revolution (1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the end of apartheid in South Africa (1994).
Where McCoy directly addresses Taiwan is in looking towards a “New Cold War.” Here, he sets it alongside Ukraine and Gaza, but it is hard to see how these conflict zones fit his classic pattern. Though Taiwan and Ukraine can be considered as part of great power competitions, Gaza is a harder fit. If anything, what these places have in common is that they are resisting the annexation of aggressors who are not only intent on taking their territory, but on obliterating their cultural identity as well.
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Publication notes
The Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage By Alfred McCoy 584 pages Haymarket Books Hardback: US
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