ABSTRACT
The Gulf crisis carried the revolution in Soviet foreign policy across another threshold—and, along the way, altered the Bush Administration's view of the Soviet Union more than almost anything that had come before. Mikhail Gorbachev, in his meeting with Bush, had constantly dodged the issue of a Soviet military contribution to forces in the Gulf, putting great emphasis on avoiding the use of force. Slowly, over the Administration's first two years, the President Bush had edged toward a more favorable view of Gorbachev's perestroika, and, in the process, had eased his originally openly negative view of Western economic assistance to the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev and his colleagues decided to cut their losses in Afghanistan, they were, it turned out, offering the first dramatic testimony to a profound reordering of their Third World priorities. The historic commitment to "national liberation", admittedly warped over the years by superpower aspirations and superpower rivalry, had gone by the boards.
