Abstract
Southwest Asia provides an excellent focal point at which to study the course and pace of global US-Soviet relations. In Iran and Afghanistan, superpower strategies and commitments have regularly intersected over the last half century. Moscow’s security and commercial interests have continuously assured the area more careful attention and higher valuation. In the Cold War competition of the superpowers, the high stakes for one prompted involvement by the other. Motivated above all by geopolitical concerns, the United States assumed in Iran and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan prominent political and economic obligations.
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Notes
Richard W. Cottam, Iran and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), pp. 66
J. C. Hurowitz, ‘Iran in World and Regional Affairs’, in Ehsan Yar-Sharter (ed.), Iran Faces the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 134.
Rouhallah K. Ramazani, Iran’s Foreign Policy, 1941–1973 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 317.
Marvin G. Weinbaum, ‘Soviet Policy and the Constraints of Nationalism in Iran and Afghanistan’, in Ya’acov Ro’i (ed.), The USSR and the Muslim World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 240.
Louis Dupree, ‘Afghanistan: 1966’, American Universities Field Staff, South Asia Series, vol. X, no. 4 (July 1966), pp. 20–1.
See fuller discussion in Marvin G. Weinbaum, ‘The Soviets in Afghanistan: Risks, Costs, and Opportunities’, in Edward Kolodziej and Roger Kanet (eds), The Limits of Soviet Power in the Developing World (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 232–5.
Bhabani Sen Gupta, Afghanistan, Politics, Economics and Society (Boulder, CO: Rynne Rienner, 1986), p. 23.
See Harold H. Saunders, ‘Regulating Soviet-US Competition and Cooperation in the Arab-Israeli Arena, 1967–86’, in Alexander L. George, Philip J. Farley, and Alexander Dallin (eds), US-Soviet Security Cooperation: Achievements, Failures, Lessons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 540.
Richard S. Newell, ‘Prospects for State Building in Afghanistan’, in Ali Banuazizi and Myron Weiner (eds), The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), p. 120.
Izvestia, 22 April 1988, p. 5, as quoted in Melvin A. Goodman and Caroly Ekedahl, ‘Gorbachev’s “New Directions” in the Middle East’, The Middle East Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (Autumn 1988), p. 586.
For a different prediction see Milan Hauner, ‘The Soviet Geostrategic Dilemma’, in Milan Hauner and Robert L. Canfield (eds), Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 177.
Bruce R. Kuniholm, ‘A Strategy for the Gulf and Southwest Asia’, in S. Wells, Jr and M. Bruzonsky, Security in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), p. 332.
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© 1991 Roger E. Kanet and Edward A. Kolodziej
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Weinbaum, M.G. (1991). Superpower Cooperation in Southwest Asia. In: Kanet, R.E., Kolodziej, E.A. (eds) The Cold War as Cooperation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11605-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11605-8_12
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