ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to assess the strategic perspective from the Mediterranean in the mid-1980s in light of the changing political and military situation in the Mediterranean per se and relative to other regions. From the earliest days of the Cold War, the Mediterranean has figured prominently in US-Soviet rivalry. But the Mediterranean has always been more of a symptom of rather than a driving force in that rivalry. The Mediterranean gained early prominence because the sea joined the competing blocs with the “arc of crisis”—stretching along the southern shore from Morocco to the Near East and beyond. Among the maritime theaters, Soviet planners give higher priority to the Arctic and Baltic than to the Mediterranean, most probably because of their more immediate relation to the Central Front and because Soviet ballistic-missile submarines operate in the Arctic and Baltic Seas.
