War Since 1945

Black, Jeremy. War Since 1945. Contemporary Worlds. London: Reaktion, 2004. $24.95.

I have read Black's Eighteenth-Century Europe, so I should have been warned about his style and the sorts of conclusions he comes up with. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that his book was the driest and most difficult of those I read for my Christianity in the Enlightenment class.

Black's goal in this book is to remind the reader that there was much else going on in this period (1945-present) than just the Cold War. Additionally, he wants the reader to see that most of the conflict has been non-Western, more specifically non-American, in order to warn us off of any Euro- or Ameri-centric understanding of warfare. He makes the cogent point that, if the USA is to be considered the foremost military power, then all others must be fundamentally different, making study only of American military forms and methods inadequate and misleading.

Much like the other book of his that I've read (he's written many more), this book, at less than 200 pages, is far too short to cover such a broad topic in anything more than surface facts. This serves to marginally inform the reader but detracts considerably from the book's readability.

The most interesting fact I learned from the book is that there was actually a war fought in Central America over a soccer match (the Football War of 1969 between Honduras and El Salvador)! Of course, it was really more complicated than that, but come on!