ABSTRACT
The Ronald Reagan administration set out to challenge Soviet positions in the Third World. It was behaving according to long-established tradition in postwar US foreign policy. Neither Leonid Brezhnev nor Mikhail Gorbachev learned the kinds of lessons from US efforts aimed at countering Soviet adventurism in the Third World. The one element of Brezhnev's belief system that prevented him from learning the deterrent lessons being taught by US foreign policy was his policy commitment to "offensive detente." Brezhnev's perceptions of US allied reactions to US foreign policy in the periphery were precisely the opposite of those predicted by US assumptions. Brezhnev's analysis of US credibility is consistent with a tightly structured belief system, severely limited in its capacity to respond to new information. US foreign policy makers have assumed that efforts by the United States to confront Soviet adventurism in peripheral areas of the globe would reassure strategic allies in Western Europe, Japan, and the durability of US security guarantees.
