The Reagan Doctrine: Gorbachev and the Third World

Francis Fukuyama

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1986

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Summary:  Over the past five or six years, and particularly since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, a wide-ranging reassessment has been taking place in elite Soviet policy circles concerning the Third World.

Francis Fukuyama is a member of the political science department of the Rand Corporation and was formerly a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. The views expressed in this article are the author?s and do not necessarily represent those of the Rand Corporation or its sponsors.

Over the past five or six years, and particularly since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, a wide-ranging reassessment has been taking place in elite Soviet policy circles concerning the Third World.

This reassessment has led to a distinct shift in the way the Soviets perceive and discuss developing countries, reflected in such documents as the new party program published in October 1985, and the report of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to the recently concluded 27th Party Congress. Gone are the ringing offers of military and economic support for the "liberated countries." Instead the program says only that the Soviet party "has profound sympathy for the aspirations of peoples who have experienced the heavy and demeaning yoke of colonial servitude"?a tepid phrase used repeatedly by both Gorbachev and his patron and predecessor, Yuri Andropov, to signal the limits of Soviet support for Third World clients. The radical "socialist-oriented" states?regimes like Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Afghanistan that came to power with the help of the Soviet Union and its allies in the 1970s?must, according to the party program, develop their economies "mainly through their own efforts." The Soviet Union will provide economic aid, training and defense assistance (in that order), but only "to the extent of its abilities." The document then leaves the subject of Moscow?s Marxist-Leninist allies altogether and suggests that "real grounds exist for cooperation [between the Soviet Union and] young states which are traveling the capitalist road," that is, countries like Argentina, Brazil, and the oil-producing nations of the Persian Gulf with market-oriented economies and strong political ties with the West.

The significance of these unremarkable phrases is perfectly clear to anyone who has followed past Soviet pronouncements on the Third World. No more is heard the optimism of the previous party program (adopted in 1961) that "a mighty wave of national liberation revolutions is sweeping away the colonial system and undermining the foundations of imperialism," or that socialism is capable of transforming "a backward country into an industrial country within the lifetime of a single generation."

Gorbachev?s Party Congress address de-emphasizes the Third World. Gone is the assertive self-congratulation found in Brezhnev?s addresses to the 25th and 26th Party Congresses in 1976 and 1981, in which he celebrated advances of Soviet clients in Southeast Asia and Africa, noted the trend toward increasingly radical socialist solutions to economic development questions, and praised Moscow?s military role in preventing the "export of counterrevolution." Gorbachev?s speech omitted separate discussion of the Third World altogether, mentions not a single Soviet client by name, and accords no special status to "Socialist-oriented" countries.

The rhetorical turnabout implies a sharply diminished Soviet interest in the Third World?indeed, a profound disillusionment with the activism of the second half of the 1970s and its accompanying support for marginal Marxist-Leninist states.

But anyone expecting these shifts in Soviet pronouncements to signal a retreat from established positions will be disappointed. Soviet foreign policy in the early 1980s has stressed consolidation; the changing Kremlin leadership ...

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