‘New thinking’ was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s own label for his fresh approach to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, which became particularly apparent in his speech to the United Nations in December 1988, when he also announced unilateral troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe. New thinking had several applications, and was as much a carefully calculated diplomatic tool as it was an extension of his internal reforming zeal to international politics. To the West the most important aspect was the new willingness to be involved in very far-reaching conventional arms control talks whereas, due to the complexities of the nuclear weapons issue, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed almost exactly a year before, had made little effective difference to the balance of force in Europe. For 15 unproductive years the West had been looking for a serious preparedness by the Soviet Union to reduce its conventional troops, and to do so disproportionately to make up for the existing imbalance, through the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks. By stressing the need to look completely anew at all East–West relationships, and to abandon stereotypical fears and expectations, Gorbachev was offering something really significant. By linking this speech to a surprise and unilateral troop reduction, he won considerable support in the West.
A second aspect of new thinking was equally attractive to the West, though it was primarily aimed at the Eastern European socialist states. This involved the abdication of the Brezhnev doctrine, propounded in 1968 to justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which asserted that national sovereignty was less important than socialist solidarity, and that other socialist states had the right to intervene and prevent one of their allies overthrowing communism. Gorbachev recognized the right of each Eastern European country to determine its own policy, and kept to this. Not only did he not try to stop liberalizing movements in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but he also did not attempt to force his own domestic policies of perestroika and glasnost on the more Stalinist states like East Germany. New thinking was without doubt the most successful area of Gorbachev’s reforms and much facilitated, if it did not actually cause, the end both of the Soviet empire in Europe and of the cold war itself.
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