The West should not under-estimate the USSR's capacity to reform, and to accommodate the West on the issues of (1) regional claims on Eastern Europe; although the WP is unlikely to dissolve, there are good chances that the Soviets will permit political pluralism (2) reduced military deployments (3) human rights.
Michael Mandelbaum is Director of the Project on East-West Relations and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the co-author, with Seweryn Bialer, of The Global Rivals. Copyright (c) 1989 by Michael Mandelbaum.
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Charts the ups and downs of Soviet-US relations in the run-up to the Reykjavik summit (including the Daniloff affair), the arms control proposals discussed there, and the political fall-out. SDI is seen as central to President Reagan's policy, contrary to the views of his officials. The events of the latter half of 1986 prove that the strategic relationship between the superpowers is a tenuous one, but that it is not founded on the classic principles of international relations because of the nuclear question. Common security must be the target for the future. Sets out the limits for US-Soviet relationship -- limits to how good, and how bad, it can be.
The dance symbolizes the over-militarization of the superpowers, leading to stagnation in the USSR and undermining the USA economically. Notes some political constraints (demonstrated by the dismissal of Yeltsin) on Gorbachev's domestic programme, as well as his conduct of foreign affairs. By 1987, Reagan faced 'new thinking' on the part of the USSR, a Democrat-controlled Senate and the Iran-Contra affair, as well as economic problems, a major cause of which has been military expenditures. These trends led to a cautious improvement in superpower relations in 1987.
What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass," exclaimed Lord Melbourne during one of the British politician's fits of exasperation over the situation in Ireland. Well, viewing the post-World War II course of Soviet-American relations, one is tempted to echo the nineteenth-century statesman's sentiments.
