Two American debates on foreign policy and national security. The Reagan administration and those who share its ideology see today's Soviet Union as not much different from yesterday's, and yesterday's Soviet Union as not much different from Nazi Germany. Like its progenitors in the 1930s, the modern Soviet Union is a “totalitarian” state, and therefore by nature expansionist, armed to the teeth, disposed to violence, fond of diplomatic tests of political will, and—as a consequence of all these factors —hard to deter and harder to beat. A different view prevails among most of the arms control community, the NATO allies, and some American academics. In its foreign policy, the Soviet Union is seen as a fairly typical great power whose behavior in international politics can be explained by the mixture of fear, greed, and stupidity that has characterized most great powers in the past as they have tried to secure their borders and pursue their interests in a world without law. It does not like to take great risks, it fears war, and it is, at worst, opportunistically expansionist. In sharp contrast to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union is more conservative than reckless; if anything, nuclear weapons have reinforced this conservatism.

SINCE World War II, Soviet policy in the Third World has gone through regular, frequent cycles, marked by different emphases in the choice of foreign policy targets and by different expectations about the nature and magnitude of the gain to be had from foreign policy initiatives. Stalin was generally disinterested in global competition in regions that were assumed to be dominated by the “imperialist” camp; he tended (with some exceptions) to deny support to nationalist regimes and radical social movements alike. Khrushchev's break-out into the Third World in the 1950's focused on nationalist regimes (India, Indonesia, Ghana, etc.) as well as radical social movements (“national liberation movements”); it was based on the expectation that, in the near future, there would be a large number of socialist states in the Third World, and that they would become allies of the socialist camp against the imperialist camp.

It is commonly believed that elections in the industrial democracies reflect a democratic class struggle, according to which lower-income voters support parties of the Left while higher-income voters protect their interest by voting for parties of the Right. This interpretation hinges critically on a series of implicit assumptions. First, the class-struggle thesis assumes that most industrial democracies have majoritarian political institutions. Second, it assumes that the typical form of political competition follows the responsible-parties model, which implies, among other things, that parties are fundamentally programmatic, adopting distinctive positions along a left-right continuum. When these assumptions are evaluated in light of the available evidence on the nature of party systems, political competition, and voting behavior, they are judged to be largely implausible. Thus, the democratic-class-struggle thesis constitutes a seriously flawed interpretation of elections.

NO country in Latin America, and few anywhere in the third world, was the subject of more social science writing during the late 1970s and early 1980s than Peru. Books, monographs, articles, and dissertations poured forth from Peru itself, from elsewhere in Latin America, and from the United States, Western Europe, and even the Soviet Union and Japan.