The East-West Contest With No End

Review

The East-West Contest With No End

The Cold War was tragic, comic, and epic—and it's still playing out today. September 5, 2025, 3:00 PM Comment icon View Comments ( )

Two soldiers walk along a fence in front of the Berlin wall in a snowy winter scene.

The Cold War is historically anomalous. It was awkwardly long, with no clear origin or conclusion. It was awkwardly vast, more genuinely a world war than either of the two 20th century world wars. And it did not fit within any obvious narrative genre. It was a tragedy and a comedy and an epic all at once—tragic in its bloody consequences, comic (at times) in its mutually assured madness, and epic in nature, a decades-long titanic struggle. The Cold War is and was strangely elusive, as both a body of foreign-policy lesson