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THE COLD WAR AS HISTORY by Louis J. Halle. 434 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

It may seem odd to put the cold war on a par with the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars. Where was its Jena, its Marne or its Stalingrad? But Louis Halle, a longtime State Department adviser under Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, and lately a professor of international studies in Geneva, contends in this cool, dispassionate study that the cold war was every bit as climactic and dramatic a power struggle as those bloody predecessors. What's more, says Halle, the cold war is over, though the conditions of conflict that bred it continue.

Halle traces the maneuvers of Russia and America through the major confrontations of 1945-1962, peeling away much of the emotion that colored the judgments of participants and bystanders alike. In its clarity and compelling dramatic line the result ranks high in 20th century historical writing.

No Obstacle. The cold war, says Halle, was a sharp spasm in the world balance of power, caused by Russia's overexpansion into Europe at the end of World War II. Just as Napoleon's France and the Germanys of Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler had upset the power balances of the past, Stalin's push into the vacuum after 1945 precipitated years of struggle to restore the balance. As Halle sees it, the Allies largely had themselves to blame. "It would have been better in the two World Wars," he writes, "if the restoration of a balance of power had been the victors' conscious and proclaimed objective. They would then, one supposes, have seen that it was essential to avoid the complete destruction of the defeated enemy's power, since that power would be needed in the postwar balance." But with Germany prostrate and the Allies in bad shape, the rapid postwar withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Europe left "no military obstacle to the Red Army if it chose to continue to the English Channel."

Halle maintains that the primary motive in Russia's expansion to the West was not the desire to make the whole world Communist, but to ease a traditional fear of national destruction--justified by ten centuries of invasion by forces as disparate as Vikings and Mongols. The history of the cold war is one in which Russian paranoia faded as American resolve grew firmer.

Toward Waterloo. Ironically, says Halle, Stalin himself felt that Russia was overextended after the fait accompli that gave Moscow control over Eastern Europe. He also argued vehemently against the Yugoslavian-backed attempt to communize Greece by guerrilla warfare. Stalin asked the Yugoslavs: "Do you think that Great Britain and the U.S. -- the U.S., the most powerful state in the world -- will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean? Nonsense." Stalin was right: the Truman Doctrine grew out of that struggle, and Stalin's successors could never expand their empire.

Berlin remained the major cockpit of contention: in 1948, 1958 and 1961, it brought the antagonists near the brink but always just a step short. Then, in 1962, Khrushchev made his biggest blunder by putting Soviet missiles into Cuba. It was then, argues Halle, that the cold war reached its hottest point. Khrushchev's backdown was the Waterloo of the war.

Irrelevant Ideology. Looking up from the Cuban brink, both sides found that a political and military equilibrium had been reestablished. "A geographical status quo that had seemed too abnormal for endurance had endured so long, at last, as to begin to seem normal." Eastern Europe was working itself free of Moscow's grasp; trade between the Europes was eroding the Iron Curtain; ideology on either side was losing its relevance. "As with the conflict between Christendom and Islam centuries earlier," concludes Halle, "the slow churning forces of secular change were transforming the conditions on which the cold war had been based. The cold war constituted one chapter in this long history . . . but destruction had been averted and, with the lapse of time, stability had been restored."

Whether stability can be maintained in the face of China's rise in Asia and the consequent American commitment there, Halle does not venture to say.

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