Title: Arms and the African: Military Influences on Africa's International Relations
Abstract: non, trying desperately to extract publicly embarassing short-run concessions from Soviet officials who bitterly defended their national pride. To protect that pride, the Soviets took draconian steps to reduce domestic consumption and used the U.S. delay to buy all available stocks from U.S. competitors. As hard currency cash buyers offering good prices, the Soviets were everyone else's priority customer. By the time the U.S. was ready to sell, the Soviets needed far less from the U.S. market. Few concessions, other than the LTA itself, were achieved. So much for leverage in a complicated world. The episode, the final stage in a process that began with the U.S. soybean embargo in 1973, demonstrated to a surprised world that the U.S. was not a reliable agricultural supplier. It would hold its customers hostage to their food needs. The main long-term consequence was to encourage major buyers to diversify their sources of supply, creating opportunities for new exporters to challenge U.S. domination of world grain trading even as American farmers expanded their production to serve what they saw as a captive American market. The U.S. had a few years of euphoria, but the end of the U.S. grain export boom was actually foretold the day it began. The Soviets are now the principal buyers in a grain buyers' market, courted as princes by competing western exporters. They are said to be very business-like buyers. The LTAs were in fact excellent solutions to a difficult policy problem. But, as this book shows, the weaknesses of the crisis management process itself, its very narrowness and intensity and presumption that all things are controllable, can often create more difficult problems than it solves.
Publication Year: 1985
Publication Date: 1985-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 12
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