A Foreign Policy in Transition: Moscow's Retreat from Central America and the Carribbean, 1985-1992
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A Foreign Policy in Transition: Moscow's Retreat from Central America and the Carribbean, 1985-1992
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Overview
Jan S. Adams analyzes the factors shaping Gorbachev's foreign policy in Central America by surveying Soviet political views old and new, by describing Gorbachev's bold restructuring of the Soviet foreign policy establishment, and by assessing the implications of his policy of perestroika. A series of country studies demonstrates how changes in Soviet policies and domestic and economic circumstances contributed to significant shifts in the internal conditions and external relations of the Central American and Caribbean nations. Adams discusses in detail such topics as the reduction of Soviet military and economic aid to the region and pressures exerted by Moscow on client states to effect the settlement of regional conflicts by political rather than military means.
The author concludes by speculating about which trends in foreign policy by Russia and other Soviet-successor states toward Central America and the Caribbean may persist in the post-Soviet period, discussing as the implications of these changes for future U.S. policy in the region.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822383017 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/08/1992 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 495 KB |
About the Author
Jan S. Adams is Director Emeritus, University Center for International Studies and Faculty Associate, Mershon Center, Ohio State University.
Read an Excerpt
A Foreign Policy in Transition
Moscow's Retreat from Central America and the Caribbean 1985â"1992
By Jan S. Adams
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8301-7
CHAPTER 1
Baseline for Change: The Brezhnev Legacy
Post-Stalin Policies toward the Third World
Soviet policy toward Central America and the Caribbean was often shaped fortuitously by unexpected regional events and opportunities, such as the triumph of the Sandinista revolution or Cuba's interest and success in pursuing overseas adventures. At the same time, through the post-Stalin period, the Kremlin's Central American relations closely followed three broad shifts in the Third World policies of Stalin's heirs. Today, therefore, to understand Moscow's relations with countries in the Central American region, it is helpful to view these current relations in the larger context of Soviet policies toward the Third World in the post-Stalin years.
Mikhail Gorbachev shattered well established and long practiced Stalinist-Brezhnevian policies when he introduced glasnost and "new political thought," extensively reoriented Soviet foreign policy, and shook up the foreign policy establishment. Yet his reforms had precedents rooted in the vigorous efforts of Brezhnev's predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev. In contrast to the relative faithfulness with which the Brezhnev course clung to Stalinist orthodoxy, Khrushchev had given special impetus to a lengthy process of dismantling the Stalinist foreign policy model that had been under way for years. This process, thoroughly documented by Jerry Hough in his study of the debates of experts on Third World affairs, began, in fact, with the death of Stalin.
Soviet Third World policy in the post-Stalin years may be divided into three periods, each marked by an abrupt change of course, and each providing an important conceptual framework for a distinctly different policy direction. Khrushchev, in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, showcased and justified the first great policy reversal. Shifting the Kremlin's foreign policy away from Stalin's blanket rejection of contacts with the newly liberated nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he called for a policy of peaceful competition between East and West for influence in the Third World. The second great shift, which emerged well into the Brezhnev regime in the second half of the 1970s, veered away from economic aid policies designed to win friends, toward vigorous support of armed revolutionary movements in the Third World. The third and final shift was sparked by the "new political thought" of the Gorbachev era and swung back toward peaceful coexistence of a new kind, based on the concept of an interdependent world. These three Soviet policy orientations toward the Third World successively dominated Soviet-Central American policy during the regimes of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev. To dominate did not mean, of course, that each change of direction immediately obliterated the policy lines of its predecessors. Through the post-Stalin period, regardless of the prevailing policy trend at any moment, various groups within the Soviet political elite cultivated conflicting preferences and sought to shape Soviet Third World policies accordingly. Thus threads from earlier periods remained into the Gorbachev years as part of the historical context and provided continuities that either contested or reinforced Gorbachev's new course and policies.
The Khrushchev Policy: Peaceful Competition
Khrushchev reversed the pessimistic policies of Stalin, based on the old dictator's perception of all noncommunist governments as essentially "lackeys of imperialism," enemies of the Soviet Union, and proper targets of violent revolutionary action. Acknowledging the new dangers of superpower confrontation in a nuclear era, Khrushchev called for peaceful coexistence with the United States, renounced armed struggle as the vehicle for socialist victory in the Third World, and predicted the triumph of Soviet socialism worldwide by peaceful methods that would be facilitated by expanded state-to-state and economic relations. Material aid from socialist countries and the superiority of their systems and ideology were to become mainsprings of the "liberation" of Third World countries from the "capitalist-imperialist camp." And although Soviet arms continued to flow to various liberation groups, the Khrushchev line placed a new emphasis upon strengthening economic, political, and ideological support of such movements.
In Central America this policy translated into instructions from Moscow to indigenous communist parties to encourage contacts with the local middle class and the military in order to reinforce Soviet efforts to stimulate diplomacy and trade. The efforts set in motion by Khrushchev to develop diplomatic ties scored solid gains in the Western hemisphere over the next quarter century. At the start of his drive, in 1960, the USSR had no formal state-to-state ties in Central America and only three embassies in all of South America (Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay), but by 1985 the Kremlin had forged linkages with eighteen Latin American countries. Among the Soviet diplomatic partners in the Caribbean Basin in the pre-Gorbachev period were the Central American states of Costa Rica, Guatemala (diplomatic ties, but no embassy), and Nicaragua; the Caribbean island states of Cuba, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago; and the Caribbean littoral states of Colombia, Guyana, Mexico, Surinam, and Venezuela. For a brief time in 1982–83, the list also included Grenada.
Initially, Cuba was slow to accept the Khrushchevian line, which the Soviets continued to pursue during Brezhnev's first decade. Indeed, until 1968, Cuban policy remained firmly committed to the concept of armed revolution as the path to power, and Fidel Castro resolutely refused to cooperate with other pro-Soviet Latin American parties. As Robert Leiken notes, the Cuban leader was still visibly demonstrating his independence as late as August 1967 at a meeting of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) in Havana: "There Castro attacked those 'antiquated' parties for betrayal of the revolution and conspiring against Cuba. He accused Soviet bloc countries of 'aiding the oligarchs' of Latin America by pursuing economic ties [with them]." Through the 1960s, according to W. Raymond Duncan, tensions between the two countries escalated, and the situation became "so strained during 1966–1968 that a break in relations seemed possible over the question of armed revolution in the Third World, especially in Latin America."
Yet, sometime in 1968 Havana and Moscow appeared to have struck a deal. In Duncan's words, "For a number of reasons, including but not limited to, the application of Soviet economic leverage on Cuba, Castro realigned his foreign policy with Moscow during the summer of 1968." And in addition to adopting a strict official observance of the Soviet foreign policy line, Castro consented on the domestic scene to a reshaping of Cuban party and state institutions in the Soviet image. For their part, the Soviets pledged to provide the Cuban armed forces with a substantial buildup of military equipment. The deal resulted in an anomalous situation, for on the one hand while Castro apparently agreed to observe Moscow's line with respect to downplaying armed revolution in Latin America, his freshly equipped troops soon became actively engaged in several other Third World settings in support of "proletarian internationalism" and national liberation. These Castro initiatives strongly resembled the earlier, more militant, revolutionary Soviet mystique of the Stalin era as well as Castro's own preferences. In hindsight it is easy to see that the rearming of Cuban forces heralded the delayed shift in Soviet Third World policies from the Khrushchev to the Brezhnev model which finally emerged in the mid-1970S.
The Brezhnev Policy: Armed Revolution
During the Brezhnev era Soviet Third World policy, while continuing to promote commercial ties with key countries such as Brazil and Argentina, gradually abandoned Khrushchev's tactics of enticing Third World countries to socialism through a peaceful transition. As Soviet experts looked more deeply into actual conditions in Third World areas, they questioned the correctness of the notion that the newly liberated countries would "grow into socialism" without a push; that is, without arms, organization, and training. A dualistic approach, suited to two quite different categories of countries, was developed, which Daniel Kempton has identified as a "strict ally strategy," used to court, through commerce and diplomacy, regionally important, large, nonsocialist states, and a "revolutionary model strategy," reserved for giving aggressive support and guidance to radical, Marxist-led (or inclined) states and national liberation movements. Emphasis upon the revolutionary model strategy coincided with a slow but formidable expansion of Soviet military capability. By the mid-1970s, military assistance had begun to replace economic aid as Moscow's key to promoting the advance of socialism in the Third World.
The Brezhnev shift was facilitated in part by changes in what Soviet policy experts described as a "global correlation of forces" favoring the socialist camp, and by disappointing results from Soviet efforts to establish economic ties in the Third World. Starting in 1975 in the economic sphere, Soviet-Third World trade not only failed to expand, but experienced a downturn. Meanwhile, Soviet ideologues were expressing renewed confidence in the power of political and military forces, vanguard parties, and governments of socialist orientation to tip the world balance in favor of the socialist camp. By 1977 the influential Third World specialist Karen Brutents, then deputy chief of the CPSU'S International Department, was cautioning that, because times had changed, a simple defense of the first socialist revolution against imperialism was passé, saying, "Today it is a question of carrying on the offensive against imperialism and world capitalism as a whole in order to do away with them."
Soviet Third World experts were slow to acknowledge Central America as a fruitful breeding ground for pro-Soviet states until after the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. One reason was the apparent failure of Soviet scholars to take the Central American countries seriously. A recent study of the work of Soviet Latinamericanists in the Brezhnev period concludes that while some Soviet internationalists—both scholars and practitioners—showed a marked improvement in the quality and sophistication of their analyses of South American countries, others still parroted the old Stalinist stereotypes and orthodoxies, especially in their studies of Central America, writing these countries off as "'banana republics' dominated by U.S. capital."
In 1980, however, Boris Ponomarev, chief of the CPSU'S International Department, in a definitive article in Kommunist, identified Central America, along with Asia and Africa, as the locus of newly emerging states of socialist orientation, and Sergo Mikoian, chief editor of Latinskaia Amerika, endorsed the military road to power in Latin America: "There is not a single example of a victorious revolution in the continent that has pursued the peaceful road." Echoes vibrated in Central America, where proSoviet party leaders in Costa Rica and El Salvador hailed armed struggle as the path to victory.
As Soviet policy toward Central America became more activist, Cuba's role in support of revolutionary movements burgeoned. Indeed, earlier, while the world's attention was captured by Cuba's African adventures, Castro had pursued a quiet, yet effective agenda close to home. Thus Cuba had provided key assistance to the Sandinista victory by funneling arms to the Sandinista forces and by helping them to unify. In addition, as captured Grenada documents established conclusively, Cuba had actively assisted the New Jewel Movement in its rise to power. After Maurice Bishop's coup d'état in 1979, Castro had supplied political and foreign policy advice, technicians, and training, transshipped military supplies from the USSR, and helped to shape the new Grenadian foreign policy line. According to Mark Falcoff, Cuba's relation to Grenada amounted to "a kind of subcontracting of Soviet influence in certain areas of the world where Moscow lack[ed] experience, knowledge, and geographic proximity, but possess[ed] a reliable surrogate."
The Gorbachev Policy: Global Interdependency
Gorbachev's model called for an end to the global, ideological contest proclaimed by Andrei Zhdanov in 1947 between "peace, socialism, and democracy" and "capitalism, imperialism, and war." Recognizing that relations between the protagonists had already changed by the very fact of their interdependency, Gorbachev's approach brought a floodlight to bear upon the urgency, in a nuclear age, for peaceful U.S.-Soviet relations.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, regional military conflicts in the Third World, fueled by the aggressive confrontation of U.S. Soviet interests and ideologies, were a major factor in undermining U.S.-Soviet détente. Gorbachev's Third World and East/West policies emphasized the dangers of this linkage as well as the added peril of nuclear escalation from regional disputes. He therefore renounced armed revolution as the road to power for nationalist liberation forces and, echoing Khrushchev's calls for peaceful coexistence and competition, he went further than Khrushchev to demand an even greater degree of cooperation between the superpowers. Indeed, the key concept in Gorbachev's policy was interdependency. For U.S.-Soviet relations this implied cooperation in disarmament, trade, and—of the greatest relevance to Central American affairs—the solution of international problems by joint action.
Interdependency, Gorbachev argued, makes all nations vulnerable to local violence that may erupt in any Third World setting, but it poses a particular challenge to Washington and Moscow. Living in a world wracked by armed conflicts that appear insoluble by military means, given the economic and political problems that fuel them, and facing a possible nuclear catastrophe likely to preclude any winners, the superpowers, he asserted, must seek for solutions together. Evgenii Primakov, then director of Moscow's Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), restated this view clearly: "Instead of viewing ongoing events in different regions through a prism of American-Soviet confrontation, the U.S. and USSR should work together to solve regional conflicts." Such was the main thrust of the "new political thinking" as it began to shape Soviet policy during the first years of Gorbachev's tenure.
Applying the new perspective to Central America, Soviet internationalists hailed local peace initiatives, such as the Contadora process and the Guatemala accord, as evidence that elements of the Soviet "new political thought" had appeared in Central America. They praised these regional efforts as indications of the preference of Latin American countries for a political solution of their difficulties, reflecting their "own sovereign initiative over the onesided dollar doles of the U.S." The United States was criticized for obstructing the political settlement of Central American issues by refusing to go along with the "realistic proposals" of the Contadora nations to end the Nicaraguan conflict and by continuing military aid to the contra forces and to the government of Honduras.
Castro continued in the old ways, just as he had in the more aggressive Brezhnev times, carrying on activities in the region to advance Soviet interests, while allowing the Soviets to remain discreetly in the background. Thus Cuba, without visibly involving Moscow, and therefore without disrupting U.S.-Soviet cooperation, kept arms flowing to irregular forces in Central America. The Cubans provided other services as well. These included education and training (technical, military, and ideological) to Third World nationals. And Havana remained a popular conference site for numerous meetings Moscow arranged for international front organizations. According to one Western observer, "Havana was second only to Moscow as an important site for meetings of the fronts during 1987." Even the Soviet diplomatic "reach" in Central America was extended by the formal relations of its ally, Cuba. For example, in Panama, where the USSR did not have diplomatic representation until 29 March 1991, Cuba maintained its second largest embassy.
Three Soviet Foreign Policy Paradigms
The purpose of this section is to examine the foreign policy perceptions of Soviet analysts and compare the conceptual frameworks underlying three major policy positions—of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev. While this categorization greatly oversimplifies the positions of individual Soviet Latinamericanists, it delineates clearly diverse components of the tangled skein of debate about Soviet policy, and it provides a useful measure of the changes that occurred in policy advice and practice in the post Stalinist period.
The following categorization is based on three contrasting interpretations of the superpower relationship. Each view implied a different image of the United States, as "antagonistic," "competitive," or "cooperative"; and each required a different foreign policy response from Moscow. Briefly defined, Image I, the image of the United States as an "unalterable antagonist," called for the Soviet Union unceasingly to build its political and military power in the world and to recognize that the United States was and would remain the "inevitable enemy"; this perspective regarded as illusory political efforts to reduce confrontation with the West. Image II, the competitive view, saw America as "a rival in an economic contest," a rivalry which offered rewards to both superpowers and which could best prosper if international tensions were kept to a minimum. Image III, the cooperative view of U.S. Soviet relations, pictured the United States as an "adverse partner," and not only sought to avoid provoking military confrontation with the United States in Third World areas, but saw the ultimate interests of both superpowers served by joint efforts to solve global and regional problems. These three approaches displayed different degrees of optimism or pessimism about current and future Soviet prospects and objectives in Central America. They differed as well over tactics, over the opportunities or constraints they perceived attached to these tactics, and the priority they assigned to avoidance of superpower confrontation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contentslntroduction
1. Baseline for Change: The Brezhnev Legacy
2. The Early Impact of New Political Thought, 1985–1989
3. Reshaping the Establishment
4. Ripple Effects of Perestroika on Relations with Cuba
5. Nicaragua: Test Case of Superpower Cooperation
6. Relations with the Other Countries of the Isthmus
7. Relations with the Island and Rim Countries of the Caribbean
8. Prospects for the Future
Notes
Index