Rereading my 1984 article “Misperception, Ambivalence, and Indecision in Soviet Policy-making,” for the first time in many years, most of the analysis strikes me as just as valid today as it was in 1984 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903573.
There is, however, an important blind spot in the article. I did not fully appreciate the panic of hardliners among the leaders of the Soviet Bloc concerning the Prague Spring. It was clear that the Czechoslovak reform movement...
... Matlock, warned in no uncertain terms that NATO expansion would be a serious mistake. In an open letter to President Bill Clinton at the end of June 1997, fifty former US senators, cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, as well as US arms control and foreign policy specialists, stated their belief that “the current US-led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic importance.” https://www.rt.com/usa/312964-kissinger-breaking-russia-ukraine/ http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2015/08/21/425670/Kissinger-Russia-great-power- ...
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/d%C3%A9tente-plus-how-should-west-deal-russia
“Leslie Gelb speaks for much of the US foreign policy establishment, writes Walter Laquer, “when he says that ... ‘It is totally unrealistic . . . to think that the West can gain desired Russian restraint and cooperation without dealing with Moscow as a great power that possesses ...
... then, however, looking at the map, thinking about Russian history and its situation in the world today, I have come to appreciate the Colonel's remark. Not all countries need to be great powers. Not all countries need to conduct an independent foreign policy. Not even former imperial powers, like Great Britain and France, need an independent foreign policy.
But Russia does.
