*Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War*, Sergey Radchenko
This book explores the Asian dimension of Soviet foreign policy during the last decade of the Cold War. It discusses the origins of Soviet rapprochement with China and the reasons for stalemate in Soviet relations with Japan. It accounts for the failure of the Soviet effort to bring China and India into a strategic alignment with the USSR, the centerpiece of Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision for a Soviet-led Asia. It shows how Gorbachev’s new thinking conflicted with the geopolitical imperative of maintaining client relationships in the Third World, and how this contradiction tied his hands in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and on the Korean peninsula. Caught up between the imperial impulses of the past and the brave idealism of the present, the Soviets lost direction, their vision unwanted and their country marginalized on the sidelines of the unfolding Asian century.
Contents
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Front Matter
- 1 Card Players: The Origins of Sino-Soviet Rapprochement, 1982−85Get access
- 2 Lost Opportunities: Japan and the Soviet Union, 1982–87Get access
- 3 The Rise and Fall of Gorbachev’s Vision for Asia, 1985–89Get access
- 4 Vietnam’s Vietnam: Ending the Cambodian Quagmire, 1979–89Get access
- 5 Sino-Soviet Normalization, 1989–91Get access
- 6 Moscow and Seoul Mend Fences, 1986–90Get access
- 7 Tokyo’s Miscalculation, 1988–89Get access
- 8 Equation with Many Variables: Soviet-Japanese Relations, 1990–91Get access
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End Matter