Foreign Policy and East Asia

An examination of Soviet relations with North-east Asia in the 1980s and the link between domestic reform and foreign policy change.

This book is a study of Soviet relations with North-east Asia in the 1980s, focusing on the links between Soviet domestic reforms and fundamental changes in Soviet foreign policy. The author uses the concept of foreign policy learning to analyse the motives of Gorbachev's foreign policy reforms.In this book Charles Ziegler develops the concept of learning in foreign policy by exploring the link between Mikhail Gorbachev's domestic reforms and the radical transformation of Soviet relations with North-east Asia in the 1980s. He argues that, although international factors may have played a role, it was pressures for domestic change, and economic reform in particular, which had the greatest impact on Soviet thinking. The history of Soviet relations with North-east Asia is briefly traced, highlighting the extent to which ideology impeded foreign policy learning under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The author then turns to Gorbachev's determined efforts to reverse thirty years of Sino–Soviet hostility, his mixed record on Soviet–Japanese relations, the turnaround in Soviet policy toward South Korea, and changing Soviet national security interests in the Far East and Western Pacific.