ABSTRACT
This chapter examines United States (US) and Soviet efforts to manage, deescalate, and resolve the conflicts in Afghanistan and Cambodia. It explores the US and Soviet role in peacemaking in Afghanistan and Cambodia. The chapter also examines the broader US and Soviet contexts within which those Afghan and Cambodian peacemaking efforts of the 1980s and early 1990s proceeded. The few efforts that did exist to manage, deescalate, or resolve regional conflicts had no real hope of success. In the United States, the Reagan administration had come to power, avowed to strengthen American military might and end the free hand it believed the Soviet Union had in its Third World policies. The Soviet withdrawal started on schedule on May 15, and nine months later on February 15, 1989, the last Soviet combat forces withdrew from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had been relatively satisfied with the situation in Cambodia throughout the early and middle 1980s.
