Perestroika and the Quest for Peace

Abstract

Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika made it clear that a new turn had taken place in soviet thinking. The analysis of the new dimensions of east-west relations in the present chapter was written in the spring of 1988, just after Gorbachev’s book appeared. The point of the exercise was to review the model of the cold war I had developed twenty years earlier in terms of the changing parameters of our times [Wolfson, 1968]. The methodological sections of the 1968 paper are included here as an appendix.

Events overtook this essay. By the time it appeared in print [Wolfson, 1990a], the Soviet Union embodied its forecasts, and at this writing is struggling to go beyond them.