ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev's themes of a new international security system, "defense sufficiency", and the denuclerization and demilitarization of international relations were reflected in the Warsaw Pact military doctrine announced at an East Berlin conference in May 1987. A strategic aim behind Gorbachev's "new thinking" derives from the lavish Kremlin's long-standing arms control objective of denuclearizing the West and its overriding post-1945 goal of disengaging the United States from Europe. Gorbachev realizes that Leonid Brezhnev's tactics in the 1970s, nuclear intimidation and military adventurism, finally alarmed the West and provoked it to react. However, the Chinese Foreign Ministry presented her with an assessment of the Soviet buildup at Cam Ranh Bay prepared by the Shanghai Institute of International Studies. Gorbachev's widely touted "new thinking" about world politics attempts to achieve certain long-standing Soviet goals as well as to address current domestic exigencies.
