Vladislav Zubok on What the Cold War Actually Was
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What does the host ask about the relevance of a new Cold War between the US and China?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And
I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, you know we did that episode with Arthur Kroper recently, and one of the questions that came up is whether, you know, you could characterize the US and China as being in a new Cold War. Right. But of course, that raises the question of what was the Cold War in the first place? Sort of an hard to answer, are we in a new Cold War if you actually don't know what the original one was?
Joe, I can see through this intro already. You're trying to link it to a previous podcast, but I know you've been reading the history books. That's what this is. You read another history book. You want to talk about the Cold War.
This is a hundred percent correct, but it's timely for multiple reasons. Obviously, because there's the US-China tension. There is the ongoing war in Ukraine. And so, you know, in generally, if you want to understand the present, you wanna understand how we got here. And you know it's interesting to me. So I first sort of quote learned about the Cold War, I think in middle school, no high school in It was like maybe ninety-three or ninety-four. Mm-hmm. And that was only a few years after I guess it quote formally ended. Yeah. And yet by the time I was learning about it in high school, it was being taught it might as well have been like Civil War history. Yeah, capital H history. Yeah, Capital H history. Yeah, Capital H history, just old history.
And I'm trying to learn a little bit more about it these days. And I read some books, but there's still a lot of questions about in my mind what it was really all about.
Well, so I also first learned about the Cold War in high school and I had a realization when I moved from high school to college. So I was doing a sort of American curriculum in Tokyo, AP history, AP US history. And then Went to London, went to the LSE and did international relations, a big portion of which is history. And it kind of blew my mind how different the interpretations of history actually were. So for instance, I had learned about the American Revolution, right? As a lot of Americans did. But in the UK, it is, of course, the American War of Independence. And so it was just a massive culture shock for me to go from that sort of US oriented curriculum to something more British centric or more international.
Yeah. So one thing I am very curious about is how the Cold War sort of played out from the non-US perspective.
Yeah, and right, like we called it the Cold War, I guess. And so the question is, what was it called elsewhere? Well, I'm really excited. We really do have the perfect guest today. He has a new book out on the question of what was the Cold War. We're gonna be speaking with Vladislav Zubak. He is the Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, so doubly perfect. He's the author of the new book. The World of the Cold War, 1945 to 1991. He's also written several other books, sort of in the same general history, a lot of Soviet history. His uh prior book that I also highly recommend came out in 2021, Collapse, The Fall of the Soviet Union, what really happened there. So uh, Professor Zubak, thank you so much for coming on OddLots.
Well, thank you for inviting me. And that's that's a great moment to talk about great changes in history as we experiencing now.
We are definitely experiencing them now. So I guess if someone had asked me like a year ago or you know, a few years ago when I wasn't really thinking about these things, what was the Cold War?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the host ask about the relevance of a new Cold War between the US and China?
0:00–4:35
2
How did Vladislav Zubok’s personal background shape his view of the original Cold War?
4:35–10:09
3
What is the central argument of Zubok’s book *The World of the Cold War*?
10:09–20:17
4
How did the United States and the Soviet Union initially understand each other’s ideologies?
20:17–30:45
5
Why does Zubok argue that the Cold War was fundamentally a contest over Europe’s post‑war future?
30:45–41:32
6
What role did human‑rights movements and decolonization play in shaping Cold‑War dynamics?
41:32–52:13
7
How does Zubok compare the original US‑Soviet Cold War to today’s US‑China rivalry?
52:13–54:20
8
What lessons does Zubok draw for today’s policymakers from the Cold‑War experience?
54:20–57:10
Speakers
10 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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