scholarly journals Mikhail Gorbachev's First Visit to Britain: 30 Years on

Author(s):  
K. V. Shlykov

The article explores the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev's first journey to the UK in December 1984 for the East-West relations. The visit was initiated by Margaret Thatcher who wanted to get acquainted with the potential Soviet leader as she hoped to become a trusted intermediary between Moscow and Washington. The revitalization of contacts with the USSR was a part of Britain's resurgence as a major world player after the Falklands victory. The discussions in London focused on the issue of strategic stability, though they could only serve to give the parties a better understanding of each other's position, as no political agreement could be reached due to the nature of the visit and the fact that any agreement on the subject had to be between the Soviet Union and the United States. The bilateral relations issues being discussed included mostly economic cooperation and such problems as human rights in the USSR and Soviet assistance to the British miners' strike. Gorbachev's speech on "new political thinking" and "a common European home", expressions first used during the visit to Uk, rang hollow to London, however Thatcher had the impression that she could deal with the Soviet politician in future. The British public opinion also saw Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife favourably. Later statements of Lady Thatcher and Gorbachev's critics on the meeting being defining for the foreign policy of the perestroika era should be seen as exaggerated, as the demise of the Communist system and the USSR were not foreseen by anyone in 1984, either in London or in Moscow.

1990 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Korey

Despite conservative opposition, in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter turned the tide in favor of the Helsinki Accord by taking a strong stand in fostering U.S. participation in it. Korey focuses on the U.S. delegation to the Commission on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) in Europe and credits the success of the Helsinki Accord to U.S. adroit negotiation strategies, beginning with the Carter administration. By 1980, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came to embrace the “humanitarianism” of the treaty. The Vienna review conference's (1986–89) effort peaked when a milestone was reached in the human rights process, linking it directly to security issues equally pertinent to the East and the West. The author contends that the United States' ardent participation in the monitoring of compliance was particularly effective in putting pressure on the Soviet Union to uphold the agreement within its territory, yielding enormous progress in human rights


2020 ◽  
pp. 233-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexei D. Voskressenski

Russia’s relations with China (and vice versa) have evolved steadily during the post-Soviet period. Leaders on both sides have proclaimed, for a number of years now, that their bilateral relations are at their best point in history. How did the China-Russia relationship reach such a stage, especially given their long (and largely discordant) history? This chapter traces the evolution of China-Russia relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It identifies the commonalities and common purposes Moscow and Beijing have in world affairs, as well as their bilateral economic, cultural, and military relations. The China-Russia relationship has important implications for the United States, as well as American allies in the world.


Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-132
Author(s):  
James Cameron

Most analyses of arms control during the Cold War focus on its role in maintaining strategic stability between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, history shows that the superpowers' search for strategic stability is insufficient to explain the roots and course of negotiations. This essay argues that arms control was used as one tool in a broader strategy of war prevention, designed to contain a series of challenges to U.S. and Soviet dominance of the international system that both sides worried could upset bipolarity and increase the chances of conflict between them. At the same time, U.S. policy-makers balanced this joint superpower interest with Washington's extended deterrent commitment to its allies, which ultimately upheld the integrity of the system as a whole. The essay concludes that today's leaders should integrate arms control into a more comprehensive strategy of political accommodation fit for twenty-first-century conditions.


Author(s):  
Alexander N.S. Chang

The Multilateral Force (MLF) was a proposed nuclear sharing arrangement between the United States and a number of its NATO partners. Proposed in 1958, the MLF was debated until about 1965 or 1966 and was often distinguished by its controversial nature and failure to gain traction. This paper examines documents from the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State, and various secondary sources to evaluate the extent to which the Soviet Union contributed to the MLF’s failure as an initiative. The Force is often treated as a narrow and highly technical policy debate by existing literature. However, examination of these documents highlighted the necessity of viewing the Force as a topic of distinct political import in American-Soviet nuclear negotiations. While technical disputes over the MLF’s constitution was an immediate cause of its demise, U.S. policymakers also faced strategic incentives not to pursue the treaty. In particular, the documents reflect growing belief within the Johnson administration that exiting the agreement could improve broader bilateral relations with the Soviet Union and ensure that the international community could continue to make progress on the creation of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement.


Author(s):  
James Graham Wilson

The Cold War may have ended on the evening of November 9, 1989, when East German border guards opened up checkpoints and allowed their fellow citizens to stream into West Berlin; it certainly was over by January 28, 1992, when U.S. president George H. W. Bush delivered his annual State of the Union Address one month after President Mikhail Gorbachev had announced his resignation and the end of the Soviet Union. After the Berlin Wall came down, Bush and Gorbachev spoke of the Cold War in the past tense in person and on the telephone. The reunification of Germany and U.S. military campaign in the Persian Gulf confirmed that reality. In January 1991, polls indicated that, for the first time, a majority of Americans believed that the Cold War was over. However, the poll results obscured the substantial foreign and domestic crises, challenges, and opportunities created by the end of the Cold War that occupied President Bush and his national-security team between November 1989 and Bush’s defeat in the 1992 presidential inauguration and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton as America’s first post–Cold War president in January 1993.


1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane S. Jaquette ◽  
Abraham F. Lowenthal

NO country in Latin America, and few anywhere in the third world, was the subject of more social science writing during the late 1970s and early 1980s than Peru. Books, monographs, articles, and dissertations poured forth from Peru itself, from elsewhere in Latin America, and from the United States, Western Europe, and even the Soviet Union and Japan.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH

Nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have got used to seeing the Bolshevik Revolution as the prelude to a failed political experiment, albeit one that lasted a remarkably long time. But why do we see it as a failure? After all, the Soviet Union was a vast empire regarded as the military equal of the United States, feared and hated by successive US presidents, whose influence extended far beyond Soviet borders to include regimes in Africa, South East Asia, Central and South America. Had Mikhail Gorbachev not been removed in 1991, and had the Soviet system been able to reform itself into something like the form of communism we see today in China, no one would regard those seventy-plus years of Soviet power as a failure at all. What is meant by failure, in truth, is not really military or economic failure so much as a failure to sustain and uphold the ideals of equality and social justice that originally drew so many to the communist cause. The haemorrhaging of members from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, for instance, was a result of widespread feelings of shock and disgust after Nikita Khrushchev's revelations at the Twenty-First Party Conference that year, at which he delivered his so-called ‘secret speech’ condemning Stalin's regime. For those who left the CPGB, and other communist parties across Western Europe, it was painful to realize that what they had for decades dismissed as ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ had in fact been accurate reportage. Most shocking of all was learning that the mass arrests and disappearances of the 1930s, and even the show trials of prominent Politburo and party members, were not proportionate, if regrettable, responses to plots to murder Stalin and overthrow Soviet power at all, but rather Stalinist crimes of epic and tragic proportions. Right up to the end of the Communist regime in Russia, reports of political and religious repression, the continued use of the Gulag system, confinement and forced treatment of dissidents in mental hospitals, literary and other cultural censorship continued to filter through the Iron Curtain.


Author(s):  
Sergey Osipov

The subject of this research is the image of the USSR/Russia resembles in the popular animated TV series “The Simpsons” throughout the past 30 years, considering the method of translating information inserted in the media text, as well as the complexity/simplicity of decoding this information by the viewer, ambiguity/unambiguity of interpretations, etc. The TB series touched upon the following topics related to the USSR/Russia: immigration to the United States and life of the immigrants in the new homeland, the Cold War, Communism and anti-Communism, Russian culture, Russia as a rival of the United States. The author traces the dynamics, diversity, and specificity of covering Soviet/Russian theme for over 30 years in the context of the dynamics of relations between the Soviet Union/Russia and the West, including political, social, cultural, and other nuances. The author carries out a cross-disciplinary dedicated to the work of popular culture in the context of political history of the XX – early XX centuries. The novelty consists in revealing the main themes of the “Russian presence” in the TV series (based on the analysis of almost 700 episodes), and the way they are conveyed (leveling the established stereotypes or their debunking for the sake of countering manipulations with public sentiment). Impugning the statement that ideology of “The Simpsons” is purely neoliberal, the author draws a more complex and critical worldview of “The Simpsons” in with regards to American society. Russia holds a special place in this world due to complicated bilateral relations since the Cold War, which consequences are yet to be fully overcome. An ineradicable remnant of the Cold War is the link between Russia and Communism, in which “Communism” is a synonym of any dissenting view. Russia is also associated with a rich, although highbrow culture, unattractive to most of the ordinary citizens. The main satirical idea of “The Simpsons” is to emphasize the cultural dissonance, which intensifies the difficulties of mutual understanding based on political confrontation and remaining ideological prejudices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-337
Author(s):  
Jacob Abadi

This article analyzes the course of US–Yemeni relations from the 1940s to the present and aims to explain the reasons for the twists and turns in bilateral relations. It argues that the US government never developed a unique “Yemen policy” and that its attitude toward that country was determined largely by its ties with Saudi Arabia. Yemen began to loom large in US foreign policy in the early 1960s when Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser intervened on behalf of the Republicans who staged a coup against the Royal imamate regime, which relied on Saudi support. The article shows that President John Kennedy looked favorably on the new Republican regime in Yemen despite the robust relations that existed between the United Statesand Saudi Arabia. In addition, it argues that despite the war in Yemen, which lasted from 1962 to 1970 and caused instability in this region, this country did not loom large in US foreign policy. This was largely due to the British presence in south Yemen and especially in the port of Aden, which lasted until 1967. The article shows how the British withdrawal from Aden increased Yemen’s value in the eyes of US policymakers, but even then, no effort was made to fashion a unique policy toward this country. In addition, the article demonstrates how Washington’s attitude changed in 1969 when the country was divided into North Yemen, which tended to regard the Soviet Union as its protector and South Yemen, which continued to rely on US aid. And lastly, the article traces US–Yemeni relations from 1990, when the country reunited, until the present. It demonstrates how the bilateral relations were affected by the superpowers’ rivalry during the Cold War, the fight against terrorism, and disagreement between the Republican and the Democratic parties in the United States.


1984 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oye Ogunbadejo

The impact of nuclear weapons on the present and future trends in international relations continues to attract wide scholarship. While the literature on the subject has been growing apace, nuclear technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the dangers posed to the survival of mankind are becoming much more acute than hitherto. In broad terms, the fears expressed about these weapons tend to centre around the implications of three major issues: the emergence of greater first-strike inclinations in the two super-power nuclear forces; the possibility of a perceived strategic imbalance favouring either the United States or the Soviet Union; and the dangers of nuclear proliferation.


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