TALAL NIZAMEDDIN, Russia and the Middle East: Towards aNew Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). Pp. 296. $49.95.

Extract

In an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, Talal Nizameddin, now a lecturer at Haigazian University in Beirut, discusses the evolution of Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East under Boris Yeltsin from the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 until 1997. The book, based in part on extensive interviews in Moscow, seeks to show how Russian policy evolved from what the author describes as the “radical pro-West” view of Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev in the early 1990s to the more nationalist view of Yevgeny Primakov in the mid- to late 1990s. In general, Nizameddin succeeds in his task, although his failure to evaluate critically some of the comments given to him by his interviewees in Moscow, such as Vitaly Naumkin, and the clearly anti-United States and anti-Israel perspective with which the book is written detract from the value of the study.