This book is a study of Soviet ties with Northeast Asia-- China, Japan, and North and South Korea--in the 1980s. It develops the concept of learning in Soviet foreign policy by examining the internal and external factors that ultimately led Gorbachev and other reformers to reject the fundamental premises upon which the Soviet system was based. The author examines the economic, political, ideological and military aspects of changing Soviet relations with the region, and argues that radical reform was due less to the pressures of the Cold War, than to factors internal to the Soviet Union.