The Tenth Period of Soviet Third World Policy
Abstract
Now that Mikhail Gorbachev has been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for well over two years, it would be useful to ask whether his policy toward the Third World is distinctive and in what ways it is different from that of his predecessors, particularly Leonid Brezhnev. Gorbachev in his first two years has consistently surprised Western observers by speaking in a very different way about the entire Soviet policy agenda. He has stated on numerous occasions that for him domestic policy has priority over foreign policy, and that to carry out his ambitious economic reform program, he needs peace and the lowering of international tensions. In the realm of foreign policy, he and his lieutenants have been proclaiming the need for new political thinking about problems of international security and global order. The new political thinking at this point consists of a few concrete changes in arms control and China policy, and a great deal of rhetoric, some of it utterly utopian, about the mutuality of security, economic and environmental interdependence, the impermissibility of war in the nuclear era, and the like. In view of this new rhetoric, has Third World policy changed? This is the subject of this report. (KT)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1987
- Accession Number
- ADA216638
Entities
People
- Francis Fukuyama
Organizations
- RAND Corporation