ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s there emerged in the West a hot debate as to whether the Western nations should continue the policy of detente with the Soviet Union. The central issue in this debate was the role of the military in Soviet foreign policy. According to the "essentialists," there are two elements that make the nature of Soviet foreign policy expansionistic. They are history and ideology. Richard Pipes has forcefully argued that expansionism is rooted in the nature of the Russian state that preceded the Soviet Union. The Soviet state, based on Marxism-Leninism, is not an ordinary nation-state but a state with a mission to achieve world revolution. Moscow is said to have a grand global strategy to fulfill this mission, and Marxism-Leninism is considered the driving force behind the expansion of communism. The most significant consequence of the Soviet military build-up is that the Soviet Union, for the first time, has global power status.
