In the end, the Finns kept their honor but lost a grinding war of attrition, ceding more territory than Stalin had initially demanded.
To argue that the Cold War ended, in other words, is to reduce that conflict to the existence of the Soviet state.
But the foundations for that shift were laid during World War II and built up during the Cold War.
The mistaken belief that the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union spurred some fateful foreign policy choices in Washington.
Less conventional for a scholar of Asian or global history is his principal argument that “the long Second World War was the last imperial war.”
They felt compelled to fight a war in order to be able to fight a war.
He conflates this with empire and avers that World War II brought the hammer down on the entire epoch of imperialism. »