ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the aspect of consensus in the form of commonly accepted operational principles in international crises. It deals with the aspect of domestic conflict and its actual or potential repercussions, taking some representative examples from the Stalin, Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev eras. The chapter attempts to create a balance sheet of the respective importance of the two aspects. Judging on the basis of the radically diverging trends of Soviet and Czechoslovak domestic and foreign policy it would be difficult to argue that there was anything to govern Soviet responses but a broad consensus on the basic operational principles. Local conflicts and limited wars directly involving one superpower and the interests of both initially pose only risks of crisis in the superpower relationship. The possibility exists that Soviet risk taking and crisis behavior merely represent a special case or an exception to the general state of affairs in Soviet foreign policy.
