The Third World in Soviet Military Thought (review)

242 SAIS REVIEW before us. The real message of Calleo's book is that the United States has forgotten the dismal fact ofscarcity and thus has failed to set realistic national goals. All attempts to compensate for this illusion, whether through virtuoso economic management or through the "gimmicks" that have proliferated in recent years, must fail. While this conclusion is politically independent, it is inspired by a pessimistic philosophical conservatism. By and large, Calleo's thoughts are not original, but his synthesis lays bare an essential issue in a way that few do, and explains it in a form free from technical jargon and scholastic prose. Indeed, this is the most coherent and concise formulation of themes which Calleo has been developing for the past decade. The hope is that the current administration, and the disarrayed Democratic opposition, after perusing this troubling book, will finally see the folly of their activist overextension at home and abroad. The Third World in Soviet Military Thought. By Mark N. Katz. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Reviewed by Laura A. Hastings. Western analysts have long been skeptical ofSoviet scholarly writings on foreign policy. Certainly the academic autonomy of this literature must be questioned. Yet Soviet scholarship, especially on Third World issues, does merit study. The monolithic Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the Stalin years has gradually been supplanted by increasingly sophisticated and controversial analyses, a development prompted in part by the vicissitudes of Soviet influence in Africa during the 1960s. From these writings, an attentive student of Soviet studies can discern the Kremlin's reaction to events or spot emerging debates among the leadership. While one cannot definitively predict future Soviet policy from this material, one can perhaps gauge its direction. In the near future, Soviet leaders will most likely be forced to reach a fundamental policy decision as to whether they should increase Soviet military support for friendly Third World governments or simply allow them to be overthrown. Military thinking could serve as a useful early indicator of the likely Soviet response. Mark Katz's book, The Third World in SovietMilitary Thought, is a pioneering study of Soviet military writings on conflict in the developing world. Katz has read the literature thoroughly and presents his findings in a cogent and compelling manner. Owing in part to the limited scope of the work, however, Katz does not expand on the relationship between military thinking and the Soviet foreign policy agenda. Katz's overarching thesis is that in the Brezhnev era the military sought a more realistic assessment of Third World conflict, requiring increasingly complex and sophisticated analyses of the issues. He follows this trend in four major theoretical areas: (1) the relationship between local wars and world wars; (2) the types of wars in the Third World; (3) the relationship between peaceful coexistence and local wars; and (4) the relationship between indigenous forces in the Third World and Soviet policy. In the scholarship on the relationship between local war and world war, Katz discovers a major reversal in the early 1970s. At that time, the Soviets rejected the BOOK REVIEWS 243 traditional assumption that local war invariably would escalate into world war and asserted, instead, that their military forces could keep local wars localized. Although this may reflect an increasingly realistic and detailed view of Third World conflicts, Katz notes that military writers still do not elaborate on the specific policies to be employed. In analyzing the types of Third World wars, Katz observes that Soviet military writing traditionally has subsumed such conflicts under four categories: (1) wars between opposing social systems; (2) civil wars; (3) wars of national liberation; and (4) wars between bourgeois states. Katz detects the emergence during the Brezhnev era of a fifth category which describes "wars of nations on the path of socialist development in the defense of socialism." He argues that the descriptions and interpretations of these conflicts remain inaccurate and contradictory because Sovietbacked regimes themselves are now faced with competing national liberation groups. Nonetheless, Katz continues, the new formulation avoids traditional Marxist-Leninist concepts and can thus be seen as an advance in Soviet thought. Katz discovers that the military initially opposed Khrushchev's landmark declaration...