James F Burke. World Affairs. Volume 155, Issue 1, Summer 1992.
Western analysts of the Third World policies of the Soviet Union in the 1980s must consider the new operational code developing under Mikhail Gorbachev as well as apparent policy changes. Analysts have characterized Soviet behavior as offensive imperialism, opportunistic imperialism, extreme defensiveness or any combination of these intentions. Recent Soviet policy has shifted away from the Leninist operational code toward one more realistic. Expansionist goals inherent in Soviet communism have been tempered by perestroika and concerns for economic, not military, security.
The collapse of the Soviet empire has created an unusual opportunity to reexamine and critique Western analyses of Soviet international behavior. It is now possible to critique paradigms of Soviet international behavior set forth by Western analysts of Soviet affairs by contrasting them with the behavior of the new Russian leadership. In addition, time has given us a chance to compare early Western estimates of Gorbachev’s intentions with actual Soviet behavior. To date, most Western analyses of Soviet policy in the Third World during the Gorbachev era have attempted to draw broad conclusions about Soviet policy goals and objectives based on a summary overview of Soviet actions in the Third World and the theoretical discourse among Soviet officials on the nature of social development in the Third World. Unfortunately, the tendency of some analysts to sacrifice “rigor” in favor of “richness” and “short-run policy relevance” has resulted in a proliferation of untestable and occasionally mistaken causal hypotheses concerning Gorbachev’s global policy. As a result, some published analyses have missed the nuances and differentiation evident in Moscow’s strategy in the Third World during the Gorbachev era.
Western analysts of Soviet behavior in the Third World have generally adopted one or several analytical models. At one end of the spectrum are analysts who ascribe to what Stephen Meyer has described as the strategic actor model, which pictures “the Soviet leadership as cold, calculating and in active pursuit of a master plan.” During the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko eras, many analysts, including Rebecca V. Strodc, Colin S. Gray, Dmitri Simes, Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Benjamin S. Lambeth, Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, W. Raymond Duncan, Carolyn Ekedahl, and Uri Ra’anan argued that Soviet international behavior was designed to achieve offensive and expansionistic goals through an increasing reliance on revolutionary warfare and military power. Alvin Z. Rubinstein also subscribes to this school of thought, although he discriminates between Moscow’s “imperialist” ambitions toward contiguous countries and the Soviet leadership’s post-Stalinist “New Imperial Policy” (NIP) in the Third World, which he defined as a policy of “intrusiveness not expansionism … [seeking] influence to shape events.”‘ The goal of the NIP, according to Rubinstein, was always “strategic denial,” rather than “ideological affinity in determining Soviet policy and commitments.”
Other analysts, while accepting the basic thesis that Soviet foreign policy was coordinated and oriented around the achievement of specific long-range objectives, believe that Soviet strategy tended to be more reactive than activist, largely acting in response to perceived opportunities while seeking to maximize strategic gains and minimize risks. This opportunist model assumes that the Soviet leaders had, in Meyer’s words, “some overall notion of direction in their foreign policy,” and envisions the Kremlin leadership as having been capable of fanning “pre-existing flames until some specific opportunity presents itself.”
Cold War revisionists ascribe to the view that Soviet policy reflected a sense of paranoia about threats from the West, which is said to have motivated the Kremlin’s never-ending search for total security. Revisionists and other analysts have argued that successive foreign invasions have engendered a permanent sense of insecurity on the part of Russian leaders, which led Soviet officials to ensure the security of the Russian heartland by pursuing an activist foreign policy. For example, Michael MccGwire has argued that the Soviet leadership was forced to maintain its hegemonic role in Eastern Europe and pursue an aggressive policy in the Third World in order to counter U.S. actions and “maintain control of its national security zone.” Analysts embracing this paradigm have generally misinterpreted the meaning of shifts in Soviet rhetoric and exaggerated the extent to which threat perceptions have affected policy goals. When Soviet officials, beginning with Georgiy Malenkov and continuing through Brezhnev’s “Tula line” and Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” sought to emphasize the potential dangers of a nuclear war or East-West conflict, revisionists concluded that the Soviet leadership was trying to communicate an intention to pursue a “defensive detente,” which sought, first and foremost, to minimize the risks of conflict. However, such a broad generalization does not go far enough in discriminating between Soviet actions taken to enhance security and Soviet political and economic ambitions. In a similar, analysts who have failed to grasp the reality that for most Soviet leaders the Marxist-Leninist ideology was primarily a guide to action and a means to an end have also tended to exaggerate the “defensive” nature of certain ideological reforms.
Some analysts have attempted the difficult conceptual gymnastics required to combine elements of the strategic actor, opportunist, and revisionist models. For example, Seweryn Bialer has argued that Soviet global policy had “strong offensive elements and expansionist ambitions,” but was oriented primarily toward the defense of the Soviet “homeland and … empire” and less so toward “the projection of Soviet power abroad.” George F. Kennan has iterated a similar perspective. In 1982, he argued that in the post-Stalin era the Soviet leadership has not been inherently expansionistic. Rather, Kennan explains, Russia’s “defensive needs” are such that it “becomes in itself a threat, or an apparent threat, to the security of other nations.”
Similarly divergent perspectives have been evident in Western analyses of Gorbachev’s policies in the Third World. Some have argued that Gorbachev’s basic strategy was always one of retrenchment, and that his policy was an outgrowth of the post-Brezhnev reexamination of the costs and benefits of propping up Third World regimes espousing Leninist dogma. Margot Light perceived shifts in Soviet policy as an outgrowth of the fact that “revolutionary democracies” that emerged in the 1970s eventually became so burdensome to the Soviet economy that they interfered with the attainment of “higher priority goals,” which in turn forced the Soviet leadership to reexamine where Soviet policy was headed. The result of this reassessment was, according to Fukuyama and Hough, Moscow’s gravitation toward the non-socialist industrializing states.
Jerry Hough made a similar argument in 1986, and concluded that Soviet activism in the Third World might be moderated in order to improve relations with the West. Hough is joined by Elizabeth Valkenier, Raymond L. Garthoff, Seweryn Bialer, Jack Snyder, Smitri Dimes, and Michael Mandelbaum in believing that Gorbachev was, from the outset of his rule, intent on pursuing a moderate and cautious approach to the Third World, with primary attention given to improving ties with the West, reducing Moscow’s reliance on revolutionary warfare to effect a change in the global balance of power, and promoting ties with the “large, moderate countries” in the Third World. Snyder, Hough, and Garthoff boldly argue that prior to 1987 Gorbachev was already retreating from confrontation with the West in the Third World, and that his strategy was basically defensive and driven primarily by a need to conserve economic resources. Snyder’s argument was that Gorbachev was pursuing a “defensive” detente, indicating a waning of Soviet expansionist tendencies, in contradistinction with Brezhnev’s “offensive” detente. Unfortunately, while Snyder’s analysis would appear reasonable in describing Soviet policy after late 1988, his analysis of Soviet behavior between 1985 and late 1987 was based on an inadequate data base. For example, Snyder completely ignored in his analysis the numerous references in the Soviet literature between 1984 and 1988 to the growing role played by the Third World in world political and economic processes as a result of both the deepening “contradictions” between the developed capitalist states and the “periphery” of the capitalist world system and a perceived increase in the economic power and leverage of lesser developed countries (LDCs).
In the traditional Marxist-Leninist operational code, such rhetoric was intended to communicate an intention to pursue a more active role in the Third World and to exploit the deepening contradictions with the capitalist world to strengthen ties with increasingly influential regional powers. Moreover, the Party Program adopted at the 27th CPSU Congress offered a rather optimistic view of the changing correlation of forces in favor of world socialism, a conclusion not traditionally associated with a “defensive” phase in Soviet policy. A number of Soviet officials even argued that perestroika was likely to accelerate this shift in the correlation of forces and serve as an impetus for more states to seek closer ties with the socialist world and/or embark on a socialist path of development. Indeed, a survey of the Soviet literature published from April 1985 to January 1987 suggests that Fukuyama’s much discussed post-Brezhnev reassessment had been superseded by the excessively optimistic expectations of the early Gorbachev era. Many Soviet officials even expressed optimistic views regarding the potential for “genuine vanguard parties” to build socialism with assistance from the socialist countries. As late as December 1987, some Soviet officials, such as Anatoliy Gromyko, were still arguing that perestroika “has once again made the ideas of socialism appealing to those social forces in Asia, Africa and Latin America which at one time began to lose faith in them.” However, after mid-1988 this theme evolved to stress the need for “greater solidarity” between all developing states and the USSR in countering U.S. and Western efforts to interfere in the internal affairs of Third World states. This theme continued to resonate in the Soviet discourse as late as October 1989.
Gorbachev’s initial goal was more likely to expand the Soviet economic base in order to support expanded overseas commitments. Some analysts, such as David E. Albright, Jan S. Adams, Stephen F. Larrabee, and Allen Lynch all experienced difficulty in explaining Gorbachev’s policy of active engagement in the Third World when it seemed irrational in the face of a deepening economic and political crisis in the USSR. Robert Litwak and S. Neil MacFarlane thus confused cause with response when they argued that “the CPSU’s strategy of economic “acceleration’ will leave few resources to expend on new third-world commitments.” In fact, if Gorbachev’s economic policies had been successful in accelerating economic growth, Soviet officials anticipated having more economic resources to expend on new Third World commitments, and in particular developing more extensive linkages between the “socialist commonwealth” and developing states struggling, in Gorbachev’s words, for “economic security.”
Western analysts offer divergent schools of thought regarding the fundamental goals of Gorbachev’s global policy and ambitions in the Third World. The basis for Snyder’s conclusion that Gorbachev was pursuing a “defensive detente” was that the “new thinking” represented a recognition that there could not be a clear dividing line between relations with the West and Soviet activism in the Third World. But, in fact, the Soviet leadership and many senior officials in the Soviet government, including a former member of the Presidential Council and Gorbachev’s personal envoy, Yevgeniy Primakov, believed that detente was divisible, and that Moscow could pursue an activist policy including revolutionary warfare directed at expanding Soviet interests and influence in the Third World, even while improving ties with the West.
Most analysts of Soviet policy do not dispute the basis for the estimates of Porter, Snyder, Garthoff, and others, who have argued that there was an increasing skepticism evident in the Soviet literature since 1980 regarding the future prospects for building socialism in the “revolutionary democracies.” However, many dispute the conclusions they drew regarding Gorbachev’s strategy and goals in the Third World before the Soviet economic collapse began to accelerate in 1989. To call Gorbachev’s policies before late 1989 a “turn inward,” as Bruce D. Porter does, is oversimplification and misses the essence of Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” which was to provide the conceptual framework for a global policy designed to keep the USSR engaged in world affairs as a superpower at a time when the Soviet Union was in a state of turmoil.
Before 1989, other analysts, most of whom ascribe to the strategic actor model of interpreting Soviet international behavior, argued that the impression of a Soviet retreat from the Third World was more the result of a lack of opportunities and a change in tactics than an indication of a reassessment of the costs and benefits of Soviet involvement in the Third World. Neil MacFarlane, William F. Scott, and Harriet Fast Scott even argued that Soviet moderation in the Third World was not necessarily permanent. These analysts were trying to explain why Gorbachev was still actively trying to expand, or at least maintain, the strong Soviet presence in the Third World. Before 1990 Alvin Z. Rubinstein argued that Gorbachev continued to puruse a New Imperial Policy. His analysis demonstrated more insight than many, but failed to predict the rather dramatic changes in Soviet policy that occurred in late 1989 and 1990. In a more recent study, Rubinstein argued that Soviet policy in the Third World after 1989 was one of “retrenchment, not disengagement,” and that Gorbachev still hoped to “strengthen the influence of the Soviet Union in the Third World.”
Edward Luttwak is another analyst whose views of Soviet policy in the Third World during the Gorbachev era have evolved. In the mid-1980s, he shared Rubinstein’s thesis that Gorbachev was continuing to pursue a neo-imperialist strategy in the Third World. But by 1990 he was arguing that Gorbachev’s grand strategy had become a “strategy of reassurance” with the aim of abandoning the Soviet Union’s “war-in-peace pursuit of limitless aggrandizement, and its influence-seeking almost anywhere, at almost any cost and by almost any means, to adopt instead the normal conduct of a normal Great Power, subject to normal domestic priorities and restrained by normal inhibitions.”
Other Western analysts have argued that skepticism of socialism’s appeal in the Third World was only slowly translated into Soviet policy. Fukuyama and Harry Gelman argue that the Soviet leadership was reluctant to make costly new commitments in the Third World, but was also trying to consolidate gains already made. As evidence for his conclusion, Fukuyama cited Gorbachev’s statement at the March 1985 Central Committee Plenum that the USSR extends only its “sympathy” to the liberated countries, and his promise in a political report to the 27th CPSU Congress that the USSR would provide help for national liberation movements only to “the extent of its abilities.” Fukuyama’s conclusion was reasonable if based only on those two speeches. However, his analysis did not help to explain the unprecedented level of aid commitments and actual deliveries to Soviet client states promised by Moscow from 1984 to 1987. Nor does his analysis help us to understand why the USSR continued to promote and assist national liberation movements in the Third World, in some cases, e.g., the African National Congress, through early 1990. In a monograph published in 1987, Fukuyama supported his case by making the claim that in 1981 senior Soviet leaders had stopped making references to Moscow’s role in “cutting off the export of imperialist counterrevolution,” which has been the traditional justification for Soviet military assistance to states struggling for their “national liberation.” By making that statement, Fukuyama revealed that his data base was woefully incomplete, because from 1985 until late 1988, Yevgeniy Primakov, Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze, and other senior Soviet officials used identical terminology on repeated occasions. In some cases they even used that terminology to justify a policy of increasing not only the quantity, but also the quality of Soviet military arms delivered to Third World nations. In analyses offered in 1989 and 1990, Fukuyama continued to exaggerate the impact that the views espoused by Karen Brutents and former Politburo and Presidential Council member Alexander Yakoviev had on Soviet policy-making prior to 1988, and even claimed that Gorbachev had an “almost total disregard for the Marxist-Leninist part of the Third World.” We have to ask: if Gorbachev had an almost “total disregard” for the Marxist-Leninist part of the Third World, why then did the USSR continue to provide a high level of economic and military aid to Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and Cuba until August 1991?
In some of his analyses, Fukuyama added caveats more synonymous with the strategic actor model, but again erring on the side of over-generalization. For example, in one paper written in 1989 he argued that: “There is less evidence of changes in Moscow’s strategic goals, particularly with regard to the competitive and expansionist aspects of Soviet policy. Some aspects of |new thinking,’ particularly those arguing that the USSR has moved beyond power politics, are difficult to take seriously, whereas others, such as the priority of domestic over foreign policy, seem quite credible.” Yakovlev and Brutents, he argued, were advocating “an activist Soviet policy which looks for conflicts of interest between the Third World and the West, and seeks to turn them to Soviet advantage.” Contrast that with the arguments he and Jack Snyder presented in previous articles suggesting that since the early 1980s “some Soviet circles” had recognized the “deleterious consequences of Third World activism for the larger East-West relationship.” Fukuyama never adequately explained, nor could he, how it was possible for the USSR to pursue “competitive and expansionistic” policies when Gorbachev was sympathetic to those who had recognized the “deleterious consequences of Third World activism for the larger East-West relationship.”
Fukuyama, Hough, and Jack Snyder all failed to grasp the importance of articles published in the Soviet press from 1985 to 1987, which argued that the Third World, and in particular the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), was becoming a new “center of power” in the international system acting “independently.” This was a view repeatedly expressed by Gorbachev through November 1987, and one advocated by former Chairman of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Ryzhkov before the 27th CPSU Congress. Other Soviet officials argued that even though the aggregate economic position of the developing countries had declined in recent years, the influence of these same countries in global politics was growing. While implicitly recognizing socialism’s waning influence in the Third World, this concept implied that the importance of the Third World to the economic and military security of the USSR was growing. Karen Brutents had not yet eschewed a rigid bipolar orthodoxy when she argued in 1986 that the USSR faced difficulties advancing Soviet interests in the Third World because many “developing countries” were not ready to criticize the “imperialist” powers. In contrast, when Georgiy Kim, the director of the USSR’S Oriental Institute, adopted a multi-polar framework in his commentary, he could argue that the USSR sought the “activization” of the Third World by their inclusion in global processes.
Robert Litwak and S. Neil MacFarlane avoided the excessive generalization characteristic of the writings of Fukuyama, Hough, and Jack Snyder while arguing that during Gorbachev’s first two years in power, the Soviet leadership continued the policies pursued since the early 1980s. Litwak and MacFarlane assert that Gorbachev was following a “Khrushchev-type approach” of “courting capitalist-oriented states,” but not abandoning either ideological allies or the use of revolutionary warfare. They differed slightly with the more absolutist view given by Fukuyama in his 1986 study on Moscow’s Post-Brezhnev Reassessment of the Third World. Whereas Fukuyama implied that the Soviet leadership might abandon revolutionary warfare and the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties (MLVP) to emphasize ties with “large and influential states in the Third World,” Litwak and MacFarlane were more cautious, and accurate, in seeing that initial shift in policy as “not an alternative, but rather a supplement to Moscow’s vanguard party approach in the Third World. ”
The weaknesses evident in the analyses presented by Jack Snyder, Fukuyama, Hough, Mandelbaum, Simes, Lynch, Albright, Adams, Bialer, Kennan, and MccGwire all point up to the problem of insufficient data bases in Western analyses of Soviet policy in the Third World. Many of these same authors have offered conclusions that have proven somewhat accurate at specific periods in time, but that are too general to adequately describe the changing patterns and goals of Soviet policy in the Third World during the Gorbachev era. By simply analyzing doctrinal changes in the 1980s and contrasting them with the “adventurist” phase of the 1970s, some analysts missed entirely the fact that a new operational code was being developed by the Soviet leadership: one that replaced a rigid Leninist bipolar operational code for a more realistic multi-polar framework. Moreover, as a result of factional struggles within the Soviet leadership, a profound shift in strategy was not reflected in Soviet policy until 1987-1989. The result was that while some Western analysts, writing from 1986 to 1988, were talking of actual or looming Soviet retrenchment, the Soviet Union was in the midst of what Rubinstein has fairly termed the most aggressive, and by far the costliest, period of Soviet involvement in the Third World. Actual Soviet retrenchment came only reluctantly, and even then only after the Soviet leadership was forced by the exigencies of confronting mounting socioeconomic chaos at home to drastically reduce the “burdens of empire.”