Three of the largest and strategically most important nations in the world--the Soviet Union, China, and India--are currently in the throes of historical change. The reforms in the giants are transforming global economic and geopolitical relations. The United States must reexamine central tenets of its foreign policy if it is to seize the opportunities presented by these changes. This pathbreaking volume in the Overseas Development Council's series analyzes economic reform in the giants and its economy to foreign trade and investment. What consequences will this have for international trade? Each giant is attempting to catch up to global technological frontiers by absorbing foreign technologies: In what areas might cooperation enhance American interests, and in what areas must the U.S. protect its competitive and strategic assets? What role can key international economic institutions play to help integrate the giants into the international economy? The contributors suggest how U.S. foreign policy should anticipate these new circumstances in ways that enhance international cooperation and security. Richard E. Feinberg is vice president of the Overseas Development Council and co-editor of the U.S. Third World Policy Perspectives series. John Echeverri-Gent is a visiting fellow at the Overseas Development Council and an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Friedmann Miller is a visiting fellow at the Overseas Development Council and a senior research associate at Stiftung Wissenschaft and Politik, Ebenhausen, West Germany.
With victory in sight, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to the consolidation of power within the former Russian empire. When they took power in 1917, the Bolsheviks believed their revolution had to spread beyond Russia or perish. Neither happened, and in the spring of 1921, at the end of hostilities, they stood alone in the wreckage of the former Tsarist empire. The Bolsheviks had, in Lenin's words, "won the right to an independent existence." This entirely unforseen situation surprised both them and their enemies. Debo shows, however, that nothing predetermined that Soviet Russia would, at the end of the civil war, enjoy an "independent existence" -- or even exist at all. He suggests that a wide range of circumstances contributed to the eventual outcome of the war and that it could have ended indecisively. In his evaluation of the Soviet diplomatic achievement, Debo describes their successes with Britain, Poland, and Germany, their continuing difficulties with Romania, France, and the United States, and the threat from the Far East. This diplomatic success, he maintains, was the result of Soviet victory in the civil war and the patient pursuit of realizable objectives.
