Small nations, take heed

• BuyHanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam by Lien-Hang Nguyen
  North Carolina, 444 pp, £29.95, July 2012, ISBN 978 0 8078 3551 7

Does the Cold War date from 1946 when Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech? Or had it begun decades earlier, when Churchill sought through armed intervention to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle? Did the conflict that Washington calls the Persian Gulf War end on 28 February 1991 when George H.W. Bush declared a unilateral ceasefire? Or did that ceasefire signify little more than a pause in a conflict with Iraq that would, in the end, persist for another twenty years? The answers to these questions not only determine the duration of those two events, but also shape their meaning.