The Final Rise and Fall of a Relationship: 1986–91

Abstract

By 1986, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his more established PLO counterpart, Yasir Arafat, faced the political reality that both the Soviet Union and the PLO had suffered a critical decline in their political standing in the Middle East. For the Soviet Union, the success of Andropov’s campaign to undermine the Reagan plan and the US-Israeli objectives in Lebanon had turned into a pyrrhic victory. As the failure of the Chernenko July 1984 Peace plan demonstrated, the Soviet Union lacked the power and influence unilaterally to promote a substantive peace process. But, given the Soviet Union’s obstructive and competitive behaviour in the aftermath of the Lebanon war, the United States was even more determined to exclude Moscow from any collaborative participation in the peace process. The end result of this was that the Soviet Union’s influence was limited to a small band of ‘Soviet Faithfuls’ - such as Syria, South Yemen and Libya - whose radical rejectionism and predilection to terrorism had increasingly led them to be treated as international pariahs by most countries outside the Soviet bloc.¹