The era of détente was, unfortunately, a lost chance for peace that instead devolved into superpower interventions throughout the developing world. Early in 1977, Cyrus Vance, President Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, offered a critique of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union as portrayed by both the Nixon and Ford administrations. “We have been led to believe,” Vance stated, “that linkages exist which do not and never did,” and that “the Soviet Union would not compete with the United States” in the developing world (10). As evidenced by several confrontations in Africa and elsewhere, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the architects of détente, were rather wrong.

In her concise and provocative work, Louise Woodroofe explores the collapse of détente through the lens of the Ogaden War, a disastrous conflict in the Horn of Africa between Somalia and Ethiopia that drew both Cold War superpowers, along with communist Cuba, to war-torn Africa in the last years of the 1970s. Both the United States and the Soviet Union understood détente differently, and the invasion of Ethiopia by Somali forces in 1977 proved a critical test of whether the United States could coerce the Soviet Union to adhere to its version of détente, while the Soviet Union had other ideas. Ultimately the United States failed in its quest, Woodroofe concludes, a development signaling that “détente had failed. The fallout from this manifested itself in renewed Cold War on both sides, which again played out to the detriment of the Third World” (13).

Mining an impressive array of archival sources from the Jimmy Carter Library and the Gerald Ford Library, and documents from the Cold War International History Project and several other collections, Woodroofe, a historian in the US State Department, constructs a compelling narrative of a little-studied moment in both US foreign policy and the larger Cold War in the crisis-of-confidence years following the United States' nightmare experience in Vietnam. Previous work on the Cold War and the Third World by scholars such as Odd Arne Westad have touched on the influence of the Ogaden War, but Woodroofe's study offers the first in-depth investigation of this critical moment in US foreign policy.

Woodroofe begins with an analysis of the Ford administration's response to the Ethiopian revolution, which resulted in the overthrow of the nation's longtime leader, Haile Selassie. She then shifts to the Carter administration and its focus on human rights abuses, followed by the surprise commitment of both the Soviet Union and Cuba to assisting Mengistu Haile Mariam, the brutal dictator of Ethiopia, through both arms and troops. The support of the Soviet Union led the United States to, in turn, throw its weight behind Somalia. The debate between Carter's two major foreign-policy advisers, Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski, covered in the subsequent chapter, highlights the larger disagreements over the direction of US foreign policy. Woodroofe's final chapters probe the influence of the Ogaden War on larger relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, including the SALT II agreement, meant to be a crowning achievement of détente and arms control. The Soviet Union had broken the United States' rules of détente, and this breach led to a more confrontational approach with the Cold War rival. “In this light,” Woodroofe argues, “the United States had to challenge the USSR early before Moscow succeeded in gaining too many footholds on the continent” (104).

The Horn of Africa had no strategic value to either the United States or the Soviet Union, but the myopic lens of the Cold War brought both superpowers to the region, and this intervention ultimately “infected Soviet–American bilateral relations, exposed the inadequacy of détente, and helped set back the cause of reducing the world's nuclear arsenals. As was so often the case in the Cold War, there were no winners – just more victims” (137). Woodroofe's well-told story is yet another reminder of the misguided desire of both the United States and the Soviet Union to manipulate local or regional conflicts for their benefit. As Woodroofe shows, local leaders, such as Mengistu, were instead able to manipulate the great powers. The Ogaden War certainly did not begin due to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, but the intervention of these powers, along with Cuba, exacerbated the devastation, leading to widespread famine and suffering in Ethiopia and eventually a failed state in Somalia. Most important is Woodroofe's contribution to our understanding of the Cold War as a conflict that played out not in the cold abstraction of ideological battles, but rather in the developing nations of the world, where millions of people suffered, as they continue to do today.