Introduction: the guns of August -- Contours of Russian foreign policy -- Bulldogs fighting under the rug: the making of Russian foreign policy -- Resetting expectations: Russia and the United States -- Europe: between integration and confrontation -- Rising China and Russia's Asian vector -- Playing with home field advantage? Russia and its post-Soviet neighbors -- Conclusion: dealing with Russia's foreign policy reawakening.
This book surveys Russia's relations with the world since 1992 and assesses the future prospect for the foreign policy of Europe's largest country. Together these essays offer an authoritative summary and assessment of Russia's relations with its neighbors and with the rest of the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This book discerns Soviet leaders' views of the United States and sees them in relation to foreign policy statements and actions. Hermann first examines the subtle problem of analyzing perceptions and interpreting motives from the words and deeds of national leaders. He then turns to cases, measuring the dominant U.S. hypotheses about the USSR against Soviet behavior in Central Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as well as Soviet participation in the arms race. Finally, he weighs his conclusions against a thematic study of speeches and publications by members of the Politburo.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union expectations were high that a 'new world order' was emerging in which Russia and the other former Soviet republics would join the Western community of nations. That has not occurred. This volume explains the reasons for this failure and assesses likely future developments in that relationship
This collection of studies investigates the political economy of international relations between the Soviet bloc (the "East") and the developing world (the "South"), focusing on the 1970s and 1980s. The works examine East-South relations from the standpoints of international trade patterns, financial transfers, and military relations.
Since the sudden collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe in 1989, scholars have tried to explain why the Soviet Union stood by and watched as its empire crumbled. The recent release of extensive archival documentation in Moscow and the appearance of an increasing number of Soviet political memoirs now offer a greater perspective on this historic process and permit a much deeper look into its causes. The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy is a comprehensive study detailing the collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe between 1968 and 1989, focusing especially on the pivotal Solidarity uprisings in Poland. Based heavily on firsthand testimony and fresh archival findings, it constitutes a fundamental reassessment of Soviet foreign policy during this period. Perhaps most important, it offers a surprising account of how Soviet foreign policy initiatives in the late Brezhnev era defined the parameters of Mikhail Gorbachev's later position of laissez-faire toward Eastern Europe--a position that ultimately led to the downfall of socialist governments all over Europe.
Because the turbulent trajectory of Russia's foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union echoes previous moments of social and political transformation, history offers a special vantage point from which to judge the current course of events. In this book, a mix of leading historians and political scientists examines the foreign policy of contemporary Russia over four centuries of history. The authors explain the impact of empire and its loss, the interweaving of domestic and foreign impulses, long-standing approaches to national security, and the effect of globalization over time. Contributors focus on the underlying patterns that have marked Russian foreign policy and that persist today. These patterns are driven by the country's political makeup, geographical circumstances, economic strivings, unsettled position in the larger international setting, and, above all, its tortured effort to resolve issues of national identity. The argument here is not that the Russia of Putin and his successors must remain trapped by these historical patterns but that history allows for an assessment of how much or how little has changed in Russia's approach to the outside world and creates a foundation for identifying what must change if Russia is to evolve. A truly unique collection, this volume utilizes history to shed crucial light on Russia's complex, occasionally inscrutable relationship with the world. In so doing, it raises the broader issue of the relationship of history to the study of contemporary foreign policy and how these two enterprises might be better joined.
Gorbachev’s Gamble offers a new and more convincing answer to this question by providing the missing link between the internal and external aspects of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Andrei Grachev shows that the radical transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev years was an integral part of an ambitious project of internal democratic reform and of the historic opening of Soviet society to the outside world. Grachev explains the motives and the intentions of the initiators of this project and describes their hopes and their illusions. He recounts the story of the internal debates and struggles in the Kremlin and behind-the-scene decisions that led to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and eventually the demise of the Soviet Union itself. The book is based on exclusive interviews with the leaders of the Soviet Union including Gorbachev, personal notes and diaries of their assistants and advisers and transcripts of the discussions inside the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee. Together they constitute a multi-voice political confession of a whole generation of decision-makers of the Soviet Union that enables us better to understand the origin and the breathtaking trajectory of the events that led to the end of the Cold War and the unprecedented transformation of world politics in the closing decades of the 20th century.
