On this day in 1980, the CIA issued a report asserting that the Soviet Union had delivered nearly $7 billion — equivalent to about $18 billion today — in military aid to developing nations in 1979 and had sold more than $8 billion in sophisticated arms to those countries the year before.
Syria, Iraq and South Yemen were the chief recipients of Soviet aid in the Middle East, the report stated, while Angola and Ethiopia received most of the arms sold in Africa. Today, the governments of all those nations, except Syria, are on friendly terms with the United States.
Much Soviet aid came in the form of state-of-the-art weaponry, including MiG fighter-bombers and surface-to-air missiles. Nearly two-thirds of the 51,000 military advisers cited in the CIA report were Cubans sent by Fidel Castro to Angola, which was then embroiled in a civil war.
The CIA report asserted that Soviet arms sales to developing nations — particularly those targeted to the Middle East — had increased instability in the region, heightening chances for further wars.
The unclassified study concluded that despite the rapid growth of Soviet military assistance to developing nations, “Moscow has recruited few adherents to its ideology.” Nonetheless, it said, the Soviet thrust had opened markets for the Kremlin and provided much-needed hard currency.
The CIA noted that Soviet trade with developing nations increased to more than $13 billion in 1978, from $250 million in 1955. The Soviets bought natural gas from Afghanistan, oil from Iraq and Syria and aluminum from Turkey.
The report did not cite U.S. arms sales to developing nations, such as Iran, during the same general period, which amounted, in all, to about $6 billion in 1980 dollars.
Russia, as the principal successor state to the Soviet Union, hasn’t played as large an economic role in the developing world as has a resurgent China. Nevertheless, it continues to broaden its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East while remaining a military player in Syria.
Business Insider recently reported that “Russia is cooperating with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to gain ground in the region in the short term, even though its interests don’t align with these countries’ interests in the long term. Moscow is, therefore, establishing a balance that lets Russia play one country off the other so that no single power gains too much influence in the region.”
It adds: “Russia’s strategy in the Middle East is to stay closer to all other players in the region than they are to one another…. Russia, however, is pursuing this strategy not because it wants to be a major leader in the Middle East, but because it wants to accumulate as much influence as possible. This would allow it to offer to cooperate with the U.S. in the Middle East in exchange for [American] concessions elsewhere.”