"Small Wars, Faraway Places," by Michael Burleigh Photographs, from left: Haywood Magee/Picture Post - Getty Images; Rolls Press/Popperfoto - Getty Images Soldiers of the Scots Guards patrol in Malaya, 1950; American Marines north of Da Nang, 1965. In "Small Wars, Faraway Places," Michael Burleigh recounts the violent end of the British and French empires in Africa and Asia, and their partial replacement by the United States in its often ill-informed and costly efforts to combat Communism during the early stages of the Cold War. Burleigh surveys many of the major international wars and anticolonial insurgencies between 1945 and 1965, but opts to focus most on those involving America, Britain and France, and how they related to the rivalry with the Soviet Union. The result is a well-researched and readable account of two tumultuous decades. Burleigh judges most of these wars, both small and large, to have been futile and destructive. But while he clearly has no interest in defending or rehabilitating such conflicts, he nonetheless offers a fair, thoughtful assessment of the motives and interests behind them. He also takes care to understand and explain the grievances of the insurgents. Burleigh, the author of "The Third Reich: A New History" and several other books, begins with the collapse of Japanese rule at the end of World War II. Japanese conquest had briefly swept away the European colonial powers, which made it impossible for those governments to reimpose their authority over their former colonies for very long once hostilities ended. Burleigh proceeds episodically, jumping from one conflict to the next with each new chapter. Though this has the potential to be disorienting, he keeps the narrative moving along. He capably introduces each new subject without assuming too much prior knowledge, and uses brief biographical sketches of the key political and military actors to illustrate the experiences that informed their decisions. By the end of the book, the United States has begun its escalation in Vietnam, and is assuming much the same role that France had just abandoned. Some conflicts from this period are inevitably left out or mentioned only in passing. For example, even though they began during the period covered by the book, the anticolonial wars against Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique are omitted. This is a deliberate choice on Burleigh's part, which he explains as "favoring depth of field rather than a wide-angled focus," and for the most part it succeeds. There is one short chapter on India and Pakistan that doesn't seem to fit Burleigh's subject all that well, but it doesn't detract from the book as a whole, much of which is usefully concerned with the reconstruction of lesser-known conflicts in the postwar Philippines, Algeria and Malaya. All in all, Burleigh has synthesized a wide range of material to create a valuable introduction to the political and military events of the early Cold War. Introducing a contemporary note, Burleigh makes several criticisms of current efforts to imitate the tactics of previous counterinsurgency campaigns, suggesting that "this may only involve selectively raiding the past to justify the prescriptions of the present." For every limited and atypical "success" of counterinsurgency in Malaya, there were several extremely costly total failures. As he notes in his chapter on Vietnam, "there were actually few meaningful lessons to be drawn from Malaya, where the Communist insurgents were ethnic Chinese and the majority population Malay." If there is a lesson to be drawn from these experiences, it is that no single conflict from the past can serve as a reliable model for struggles in the present. The particular circumstances of each country are far more important in determining the outcomes of wars. Anti-Communist "domino" theories also come in for repeated criticism, since they were based almost entirely on an irrational alarmism rather than informed political analysis. Colonial governments had an incentive to stoke American fears of Communism among the insurgents, and American policy makers were inclined to imagine a monolithic global Communism that never existed. Because of this, the United States backed doomed efforts to shore up empires, and then ignored national differences that could, and later did, split the Communist powers. In a subtle nod to George Kennan's criticisms of the time, Burleigh emphasizes that a belief in monolithic Communism was one of the main errors of American policy makers during this period. Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative.