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Can Glasnost Bring Peace in the Middle East?
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17533 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
2,144 Words |
| Author
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Amos Perlmutter
Amos Perlmutter is professor of political science at
American University and is the author of thirteen books
dealing with the role of the military in politics, strategy
and the Middle East. He is the author of The Life and Times
of Menachem Begin and is the editor of the Journal of
Strategic Studies. |
The dramatic events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have drastically altered the political, military, and diplomatic landscape in Europe. The effects and the dangers of Mikhail Gorbachev's twin policies of glasnost and perestroika are still being felt, altering East-West relations. In an atmosphere of almost daily drama, it is easy to overlook glasnost's spillover effects elsewhere. In less obvious ways, events in the Soviet Union are altering accepted realities in the Middle East.
The most immediate beneficiary in the Middle East of glasnost's effects is Israel, and not just because of the Soviet Union's willingness to let thousands of its Jewish citizens emigrate. It is obvious that the Soviet Union is now less and less willing and economically able to indulge in the kind of superpower competition and clientism it once did in the Middle East. This is not good news in Syria, whose armies have been equipped and resupplied by the Soviets; Iraq, where Saddam Hussein has made a career of juggling the United States and the Soviet; South Yemen; numerous other Arab states; and the headquarters of a score of terrorist groups.
The effects of glasnost in the Middle East will not be the same as they were in Eastern Europe, where communist regimes toppled like cardboard houses without Soviet military backing. They will be more subtle and more long range in impact.
On the international front, the events of the past year have signaled the end of the Cold War to many observers, and while this judgment might be overly optimistic and premature - given the nature of power politics in the USSR - certainly the age of nuclear rivalry, arms competition, and regional conflicts through the use of surrogates appears to be over. The ideological struggle between democratic capitalism and communism-Leninism is at an end. Leninism and Stalinism are bankrupt for the simple reason that as ideologies and as economic/political systems, they have not worked and have led, in most cases, to disaster - to the point where subject peoples are clamoring for democracy and market economy.
What this means internationally, specifically in the Middle East, is that Third World countries can no longer manipulate and blackmail the superpowers for huge dollops of military and economic aid. Despots of all sorts-right, left, praetorian, or religious - in all areas of the world can no longer receive massive shipments of the latest sophisticated weaponry by playing one side against the other. The age of men like Nasser, Nkruma, Ortega, Qaddafi, and Khomeini is
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