Was the Third World just the Cold War’s chessboard?

The short answer

• Decolonization and bipolarity, mutually radicalizing. The imperial powers had exhausted resources, faced nationalist movements and suffered wartime defeats that weakened their prestige. Singapore was one such defeat. These pressures were already breaking empires apart when the superpowers brought their rivalry to the resulting struggles. Liberation movements could seek a foreign patron; Washington and Moscow could treat local rivals as assets or threats in a worldwide contest. Washington backed anti-communist rulers including Mobutu, Pinochet and apartheid Pretoria, however harsh their rule. Soviet “scientific socialism” wrecked half the economies it advised. The wars had local causes, but outside money and weapons altered their course and prolonged the violence.
• Non-alignment was a strategy, not a sentiment. India accepted Soviet steel mills and American wheat while criticizing both sides. Nasser took Soviet arms and hanged Egyptian communists. Tito obtained Western loans against Soviet pressure. Their dealings illustrate what non-alignment could achieve: competing suppliers offered a chance to acquire dams, universities and armies without formally joining either camp. The terms still reflected unequal power, and aid could carry conditions. Nor could bargaining guarantee a leader’s safety. Lumumba’s removal and murder showed how little protection non-alignment sometimes provided.
• Clients pulled patrons, not only the reverse. The direction of influence did not always run from patron to client. Sadat expelled 15,000 Soviet advisers in 1972 and attacked Israel in 1973 partly to make both superpowers take Egypt seriously. He then moved toward Washington in pursuit of a Sinai settlement; Egypt’s alignment changes on the map in 1979. Castro sent troops to Angola before consulting Moscow. Israel, Syria, both Koreas and both Vietnams also presented their patrons with decisions already made. The powers had to manage crises that their partners had helped create.
• The oil weapon rewrites the ledger. Oil gave producing states a source of influence and imposed heavy costs on importers. After the 1973 embargo and price shock, the price rose from about $3 to $12 a barrel. OPEC states gained power; oil-importing Third World countries faced especially severe pressures. The shock helped end the postwar boom and contributed to borrowing that fed the debt spiral of the 1980s. Higher prices also sustained the Soviet Union, an oil exporter, for a decade. When prices collapsed in 1986, some of that support disappeared. The price of oil shaped the resources available to states across the Cold War divide.

What it changed

Communism’s maximum map — and its hollowness. From 1975 to 1979, Indochina, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Nicaragua moved into the communist column. For Moscow, the expanding map suggested that the “correlation of forces” was turning in its favor. Yet the new relationships also demanded subsidies and became entangled in guerrilla wars. The US Congress barred covert military aid in Angola in 1976; Moscow interpreted this post-Vietnam restraint as retreat and overcommitted. Within fifteen years every tan state on the map except Cuba had left the column. The moment of apparent expansion had brought liabilities as well as gains.

The wounds that outlive the era. Consider what remained after outside patrons had armed and financed their allies: Mobutu’s Zaire, wars in the Horn of Africa, Angola’s 27-year civil war, Middle Eastern garrison states and Latin America’s torture archives. Each has its own history, but Cold War support helped equip armies, sustain governments and suppress opponents. Some subsidies ended after 1991. The institutions and conflicts built with their help did not simply disappear when the rivalry ended.

Human rights enter the arsenal. Reports of the Chilean military government’s brutality helped bring human rights into international debate. The 1975 Helsinki Accords contained rights provisions, and the US Congress began conditioning some aid on human-rights practices. In 1977 Carter made rights a declared policy. Enforcement was selective: allies’ abuses often received gentler treatment. Even so, dissidents from Santiago to Moscow could invoke the language and commitments against their own governments. A vocabulary used to challenge Western clients also became a resource against Soviet-bloc rule in the 1980s.