Beyond the Soviet Threat

The radical transformations that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in December, 1991, have profound implications for the way Americans and the West generally should think about security policy. This book takes an initial step in reorienting Western security studies absent the Soviet threat.

The book consists of two parts. The first focuses on the changes leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and their connections to Soviet and now Russian foreign and military policy. The second analyzes the dynamics of U.S.-Soviet interactions, the prospects for peace and stability in the new world, and the changed relevance of deterrence, spiral, and other models of East-West interaction in a world where Soviet aggressiveness is a negligible concern even though the new Commonwealth of Independent States remains the possessor of thousands of nuclear weapons. It is in the linking of two areas of inquiry—Russian studies and security studies—that this book is distinctive.

The authors argue that the Soviet Union has, indeed, lost the Cold War and that the delicate task of encouraging the growth of economic markets and political democracy in the part of the world previously dominated by Soviet power has become the central task for American security policy in the post-Cold War environment.

This books is important reading for students of Soviet and Russian military and foreign policy and American foreign policy and will be of interest to general readers who want to understand the dimension of contemporary change in the former USSR and its implications for the United States.

Contributors are Andrew Bennett, Charles L. Glaster, Ted Hopf, Paul Huth, Allen Lynch, Miroslav Nincic, Richard Hyland Phillips, Philip G. Roeder, and Deborah Yarsike.