An exit without strategy: learning from the Soviet Bloc’s retreat from the Horn of Africa and Central America

Abstract

This article investigates the closing years of East–West Cold War rivalry by focussing on the inconsistent implementation of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of de-escalating decade-long regional conflicts across the globe. It closely examines Moscow and its Eastern European ally’s disengagement from two of the hottest war zones at the end of the Cold War, the Horn of Africa and Central America, consulting a wide range of Soviet and Eastern European party, diplomatic and security services archives. The paper argues that there was more to an economic interest that justified the Soviet Bloc’s continuing military deliveries as its leaders publicly pleaded for disarmament. As the military and intelligence services maintained their policy influence until late 1980, some of their analyses suggest that lingering security imperatives concerning the progressive regimes in the developing nations continued to play a notable role behind the scenes in motivating the Bloc’s contradictive withdrawal. This argument provides a plausible correlational explanation for the lingering inertia of ‘old thinking’ in the Kremlin’s relations with today’s Global South, precipitating a less orderly exit from regional hotbeds of conflict.