Overview

They called it the Cold War. For most of the world, it burned white-hot. While the superpowers never fired directly at each other, millions died in their name. From the rice paddies of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan, from the jungles of Angola to the villages of Central America, the United States and Soviet Union fought a ruthless global competition not with their own soldiers, but through proxies, puppets, and populations caught in the crossfire. The Frozen Conflict reveals the devastating human cost of a war that was anything but cold. Mohammad Talib masterfully traces the roots of proxy warfare from the 19th-century Great Game between British and Russian empires through four decades of Cold War conflicts that killed an estimated five to six million people most of them civilians who never chose to become battlegrounds for ideology. This is the Cold War as it was actually fought: The CIA coup that overthrew Iran's democracy for oil. The mujahideen armed with American weapons who would become tomorrow's terrorists. The death squads in El Salvador trained at the School of the Americas. The Angolan civil war where Cuban troops fought South African forces 5,000 miles from home. The villages in Laos bombed into oblivion in a war most Americans never knew existed. Drawing on declassified documents, survivor testimonies, and on-the-ground research across four continents, Talib exposes the brutal machinery of proxy warfare: how superpowers selected and manipulated local actors, how they calibrated violence to achieve objectives while avoiding direct confrontation, and how they abandoned allies the moment strategic calculations changed. But this is also a story of resilience and resistance. From the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina to the Afghan fighters who defeated a superpower, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, The Frozen Conflict shows how the Cold War's patterns persist into our present and warns that we are condemned to repeat them unless we understand the true price of fighting without fighting.

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