The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism.

• Author: Uneke, Okori

Fritz Bartel. The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2022. 429 pages. Hardcover, $45.00

Fritz Bartel's book offers a compelling interpretation of how the much-dreaded Cold War ended peacefully and resulted in the rise of neoliberalism, a political approach that favors freemarket capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending. In his narrative, Bartel contends that the Cold War began as a competition between democratic capitalism and state socialism to provide welfare to their populations. After the economic depression of the 1930s led to fascism and World War II, governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain argued that their system of government and economy could best provide all the trappings of modernity. Bartel refers to this as the politics of making promises. But the economic shocks of the 1970s, occasioned by the 1973 oil price hikes by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in retaliation for the United States supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War, flipped over that competition to make promises, and turned the Cold War into a competition to break promises. Without a doubt, the 1973 Oil Shock plunged the global economy into disarray. In effect, energy and financial markets pressured governments on both sides to introduce economic discipline in their governing pledges.

The implication was that capitalist democracies that successfully forced something unwelcome, such as unemployment, price increases, rising inequality, and bankruptcies of nonprofitable state-owned enterprises without inviting social unrest survived, while socialist states that could not collapsed. Ergo, Bartel argues that democratic capitalism won the Cold War ostensibly because it showed the resolve to impose market discipline on its own people. State socialism collapsed because it could not. The book narrates how the pressure to break promises propelled the end of the Cold War. Liberal democracies and neoliberal economies won out because they proved most skillful at foisting austerity. Thus, neoliberalism served as a handy tool and ideological platform for governments on both sides to break promises. The bottom line was that promises were broken because governments could no longer meet the expectations of their populations, stemming from the post-World War II economic marvel about continuously rising standards of living. And Bartel...