Trade and technology transfer have come to occupy a major role in Soviet-American relations. Twice in recent years embargoes have been imposed on the sale of U.S. high technology to the U.S.S.R., and these sanctions have had wide-ranging political and economic consequences in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. The Politics of East-West Trade draws together leading U.S. and European scholars, government officials, and businesspeople to explore the complex issues arising from U.S. trade policies toward the Soviet Union. The book begins with an assessment of the degree to which the Soviet economy is dependent on Western technology imports. In subsequent chapters, in addition to assessing the general nature and volume of U. S .-U. S. S .R. trade, the contributors consider the extent to which Western technology has helped or hindered Soviet economic and technological growth; the specific impact of U.S. trade sanctions in four critical sectors (computers, energy, agriculture, and defense); and the impact in the West of U.S. trade policies (for example, recent embargoes have resulted in the loss of several billion dollars in U.S. equipment and commodity sales to the U.S.S.R.). Examining the serious strains that differences over East-West trade policy have put on U.S. relations with its West European allies, the authors conclude that there are tangible limits on the ability of the United States to use technology trade as leverage to alter Soviet policies.

Considers problems of strengthening NATO after France's withdrawal.

Sayle's book is a remarkably well-documented history of the NATO alliance. This is a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on NATO and a foundation for understanding its current challenges and prospects.― Choice Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

East-West trade and technology transfer have always been linked to the issue of "national security". The author identifies many different Western doctrines on East-West trade, demonstrating that two basic belief systems underly these doctrines.