Soviet Strategic Interests in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The security interests of the states are rarely matched fully by their military capabilities. Nevertheless, external interests serve to guide the development of military capabilities. For external analysts, the identification of a state's security interests is useful for interpreting current military capabilities as well as for trying to anticipate the direction of future developments. For these reasons, Soviet strategic interests are discussed in this introductory section while current Soviet military capabilities arc dealt with in the following section. Largely for reasons of geography, the Soviet Union has tended to regard Southeast Asia as a region of secondary strategic interest. Moscow's primary concerns lie elsewhere. They are focused on regions adjacent to its borders ? Europe, China, and Northeast Asia ? while in the Third World the primary focus has been on the Middle East and then on South Asia.