The superpowers and the Third World

In the early 1980s the Soviet leadership appeared hopeful that global trends favoured, and would continue to favour, communism. The sense inside the Kremlin — in retrospect based on unrealistic assumptions — was that ‘the world was going our way'; that the United States and capitalism had entered an era of stagnation and decline.

In contrast, a sense of economic and political malaise marked the 1980 presidential elections in the United States. The Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, received just over half of the popular vote and ousted the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter (owing to the presence of a strong third- party candidate, John Anderson, Carter received approximately 41 per cent of the vote). Upon taking office in early 1981 Reagan offered to reinvigorate America's foreign policy by confronting the communist menace globally, from Afghanistan to Central America. Yet neither Reagan nor his advisers envisioned the drama that would begin to unfold after his re-election in 1984. Initially, Reagan's election simply confirmed the increase in Soviet-American tensions that had, in the late 1970s, caused the demise of detente.

mujahedeen (Arabic: those who struggle in the way of God)

Term used for the Muslim guerrillas who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979-89.

A key element in the cooling of Soviet-American relations was the war in Afghanistan. However, its significance went beyond the damage that it inflicted on detente, for in the 1980s, it was this war above all other factors that forced the Soviet Union towards reform of its internal system; indeed, a number of writers have compared the USSR's efforts to bolster a friendly communist regime in Kabul to the American engagement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

Great Powers

Traditionally those states that were held capable of shared responsibility for the management of the international order by virtue of their military and economic influence.

There was a historical irony in all of this. The Soviets had consistently preached anti-imperialism as part of their ideological hostility towards capitalism, and had accordingly presented themselves as the champions of the struggle against colonialism. However, just as their campaign finally appeared to be yielding success, the Soviets, perhaps because they increasingly appeared to be ‘just' another Great Power, found that the recipients of their aid were reluctant to do any­thing to compromise their sovereignty and independence. In other words, they saw the Soviet Union as merely yet another foreign master. Nor did the Angolans,

Ethiopians, Vietnamese or Afghans see the East-West confrontation as the eternal leitmotif of their respective histories. The collapse of the Cold War as an international system was thus to a large extent a result of the Third World's rejection of the need to see every issue from the increasingly arcane context of the clash between capitalism and socialism.