Word: speech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shifting European alliances. The subsequent 40 years have been shaped by a struggle between two rival superpowers for military and ideological supremacy in all corners of a decolonized globe. Now comes Mikhail Gorbachev with a sweeping vision of a "new world order" for the 21st century. In his dramatic speech to the United Nations last week, the Soviet President painted an alluring ghost of Christmas future in which the threat of military force would no longer be an instrument of foreign policy, and ideology would cease to play a dominant role in relations among nations...
...perhaps the greater danger was that the U.S. would again find itself unable to seize the initiative or provide an imaginative response. Gorbachev's U.N. speech was the most resonant enunciation yet of his "new thinking" in foreign policy, which has the potential to produce the most dramatic historic shift since George Marshall and Harry Truman helped build the Western Alliance as a bulwark of democracy. But as the Soviets play the politics of da -- saying yes to issue after issue raised by the Reagan Administration -- the U.S. seems in peril of letting its wary "not yet" begin to sound...
What is destined to be remembered about Gorbachev's Dec. 7, 1988, speech is not just his specific proposals -- many of them had been made before -- but also the way they fit together in a world forum to transcend the ideological dogmas that have driven Soviet foreign policy for 70 years. With his metal- rimmed glasses glinting in the lights of the General Assembly's green marble dais, Gorbachev praised the "tremendous impetus to mankind's progress" that came from the French and Russian revolutions. "But," he added -- and a listener should always lean forward when Gorbachev begins a sentence...
...thrusting, threatening nature of that empire. Historic Russian expansionism, the Marxist-Leninist ideology of global class conflict, and a Kremlin mind-set that security can come only through the insecurity of adversaries have combined to create a nation whose defensive instincts can be frighteningly offensive. In his speech, Gorbachev proposed to preclude any "outward-oriented use of force," a phrase that nicely captures the essence of Soviet military policy since World War II. More important were his promised troop cuts, not just their numbers but their nature. The West has long insisted that any conventional-forces agreement requires the Soviets...
...These troops have also served as the Soviet jackboot on the throat of East European nations, whose subjugation is another cause of the cold war. Gorbachev's cuts will not necessarily raise the Iron Curtain, but his U.N. speech did pledge that "freedom of choice is a universal principle that should allow for no exceptions," and added, "This applies both to the capitalist and to the socialist system...