Word: kremlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...continuing overall Soviet design for the conquest of the world. More moderate experts, like Diplomat and Historian George Kennan, the father of the doctrine that the U.S. and its allies must "contain" Soviet expansionism around the globe, had another explanation. They believed that Leonid Brezhnev and the other Kremlin gerontocrats were seeking a buffer zone against Islamic ferment in Iran, much as Joseph Stalin had erected the Iron Curtain to protect the U.S.S.R. against its enemies in the West after World...
Whatever the motivation, Soviet expansionism was widely seen as a major threat to vital Western interests and world peace. Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, like Stalin's, would not feel entirely secure until all other nations felt entirely insecure. Predatory or paranoid, the old men in the Kremlin seemed determined to continue playing the "Great Game" much as Rudyard Kipling had described it a hundred years before, when Czarist Russia and the British Raj maneuvered for influence among the tribes of the Hindu Kush...
...while, the Soviets seemed to be winning almost everywhere. From Kampuchea in Southeast Asia to Angola and Ethiopia in Africa to Nicaragua in Latin America, Kremlin-backed or Kremlin-installed regimes had an ominous look of permanence. After all, Soviet power, once entrenched beyond its own borders, had never allowed itself to be dislodged by local resistance. There was no reason to think Afghanistan would be different. Quite the contrary, tucked up against the soft underbelly of Soviet Central Asia, that benighted country seemed to have become virtually a 16th republic of the U.S.S.R...
...spokesmen were using it as Exhibit A in a campaign to convince international public opinion that the U.S.S.R. now has a more benign foreign policy. "Even the professional Russia-haters must now admit that things have changed, and they've changed for the better," says Georgi Arbatov, the Kremlin's best- known America watcher. "We are going to do something terrible to you -- we are going to deprive you of an enemy." Gorbachev would have the world believe he is ready to do with the cold war what he is starting to do with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan...
...result, U.S. policymakers are skeptical as they look for further evidence -- an Exhibit B or C -- that the Soviet Union is changing its deeds as well as its words. To date, they see plenty of signs beyond Afghanistan that the Kremlin has adopted a slicker diplomacy. But the substance is still often flimsy and the objective is still competitive. Michael Armacost, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, has been conducting talks with Soviet officials on what he calls "super-regional" issues -- trouble spots like the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, which could ignite a clash between the superpowers...