What was the Cold War? Ostensibly it was a global struggle between communism and democracy, with frightening military formations arrayed along the central front in Europe. Three “Berlins” seemed to typify the conflict and to place the appropriate emphasis on Europe: the airlift in 1948 at the Cold War's reported begining, the crisis in 1961 that summed up its bipolar and intractable nature, and the dismantling of the wall in 1989 that presumably ended it. Hardly any lives were lost along the central axis of division in Europe, which encourages historians like John Lewis Gaddis to speak of a “long peace” in our time. Gaddis argues for the success of George Kennan's containment doctrine, conceived as a long twilight struggle to hold the existing lines of the postwar settlement, until the Soviet Union saw the error of its ways and reformed itself. When Gorbachev proceeded to dismantle the Soviet empire, Kennan's wisdom seemed triumphant. Only a myopic Eurocentrism could yield such conclusions.

In fact, Europe fought a “shadow conflict,” obscuring the real history of the past four decades. Kennan's strategy had a curiosity in an unspoken premise: The doctrine was meant both to contain the enemy, the Soviet Union, and the allies—mainly West Germany and Japan. Kennan was one of the architects of a strategy in which West Germany and Japan were shorn of their previous military and political clout during the period of American occupation, but their industrial economies were encouraged to revive, and they were posted as engines of growth in the world economy.