Soviet Perspectives on Asian Security

Abstract

The accelerating pace of Sino-Soviet normalization, Soviet-South Korean mutual recognition, enhanced prospects for resolving the Cambodian conflict, and the intensified, if still inconclusive Soviet dialogue with Japan all testify to the vigor of Soviet diplomacy in Asia. Moreover, all of them clearly represent the fruition of major elements of Gorbachev's Asian policy framework laid out in his Vladivostok and Krasnoyarsk speeches. As a result of these events and the trends they symbolize we can begin to make conclusions concerning the nature or even existence of a Soviet Asian strategy. Indeed, the outlines of a strategy are clear and point to a new policy and tactics for Asia whose ultimate target is Japan-more precisely the U.S.Japanese security system-and whose key objective was to improve relations with China. In other words, the strategy targeted on Japan and the United States has not changed but the policy and tactics differ fundamentally. This distinction becomes clear if one considers that, from the Soviet standpoint, strategy, policy, and tactics are all discrete, if overlapping phenomena.1 At the same time the tactics, particularly in the military domain, for example, the issues of the Kurile Islands and the opening up of Vladivostok and the Maritime Provinces as foreign economic zones, are the subject of an intense debate in the USSR between the services and the reformers, a debate which also overlaps the intense military-civilian debate inside the USSR on all security issues.