ABSTRACT
In 1979, the Soviet Union was arguably at the highest point of its international prestige since the Second World War. This was partly because its opponent in the Cold War, the USA, was going through an existential crisis after Watergate and the Vietnam War. This chapter show that there were pockets of resistance elsewhere in Eastern Europe which lived on after the uprisings of the 1950s and 1960s. However, for the most part, the early 1980s in the Eastern Bloc saw the dictatorships largely unthreatened. From the non-Soviet perspective though, the USSR’s actions in Afghanistan simply confirmed certain global views that expected the Soviet Union to act in an expansionist, threatening way. This is the way China and the US interpreted things as the invasion reinforced their fears that the Kremlin was looking to dominate regions that were not completely under its control.
