Gorbachev's Russia And American Foreign Policy
Valuable, timely essays by 13 well-known American authorities. More than half the book probes the nature and sources within the Soviet Union of the changes Gorbachev is seeking to accomplish. The remaining chapters are cautiously optimistic in exploring the international implications. Professor Bialer concludes, for example, that "the time has come at least to suspend the idea that we must conduct a crusade [against] . . . the Soviet Union. The continuation of such an attitude will leave us standing alone among the developed capitalist societies."
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Describing American neoconservatism as a branch of Cold War liberalism, John Ehrman's new study overlooks the Trotskyist roots and missionary mentality that prolonged and escalated the Cold War.
Reprints extracts of an article first published in the Apr 1951 issue of FA, after the Korean invasion had intensified the Cold War, which prophetically described the possible characteristics of a post-Soviet Russia, of which US foreign policy-makers ought to be cognizant. The reprint does not make clear where the 'cuts' have been made.
Moscow with a Soviet hangover tests the patience even of those who most wish to engage it. As Chechnya festers, privatization lags, and the world contemplates the possibility of a communist president in the Kremlin dreaming of empire, some ridicule the notion of partnership. Russian chauvinists paint America as the enemy, but the interests of the two countries after the Cold War are compatible. The West should focus its attention--and Russia's--on common interests like nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, regional peace, and full participati0n in the world economy. America should deal rationally with irrationalities in a nation finding its way.

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