Foreign Policy and East Asia
Learning and Adaptation in the Gorbachev Era

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

Charles E. Ziegler (Author)

9780521425643, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 23 September 1993

212 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

"...an insightful book on Soviet policy toward East Asia in the 1980s." Wayne Patterson, Asian Affairs

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.

1. Introduction
2. Learning, adaptation, and foreign policy change
3. Learning and adaptation in the historical context
4. The People's Republic of China
5. Japan
6. The Korean peninsula
7. Learning and security in the Asian-Pacific region
8. Conclusion: Soviet foreign policy learning.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS]