ABSTRACT
A national security community exists in the United States. This community is a loosely knit and ill-defined group made up of academics, private citizens, corporate leaders with an avocation for foreign affairs, and government officials responsible for making foreign policy. Richard Pipes fears that Americans tend to treat the Soviet Union as though it were essentially the same in character as the United States. To his mind, however, the Soviet Union, because of its different evolution, is barely comparable to nations of the West. For Pipes the real problem facing the West is not that Russians are governed by a distasteful regime but that the internal dynamics of their political system requires an imperialist foreign policy. The cause of Soviet expansionism is an oligarchy concerned both with the “need to justify its authority” and “the desire to enhance this authority.”
