The reason for Russia’s interest in the Middle East is solely that of power politics. Considering her announced purpose of Communizing the world, it is easy to understand her hope of dominating the Middle East.

—President Eisenhower, 1957

The Soviet Union sees its security in spreading Communism. . . . [It] won’t be satisfied until the whole world becomes Communist.

—Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, 1978

It has been many years now since thoughtful people in the West have lost much sleep over the prospect of world domination by the Communist International (Comintern). This has never been truer than over the past year, when the West has been treated to the spectacle of two major wars between Communist powers, first between Cambodia and Vietnam, and then between Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China. One suspects that even officials of the Carter administration, for all their legalistic sanctimony over the use of force and the crossing of international boundaries, felt a certain satisfaction deep down that such events could occur. The two invasions proved to all remaining doubters what many liberals wanted to believe all along: that the spread of Communism throughout the Third World did not in itself represent a threat to American security, and that in any case Moscow had given up on the project long ago in despair over the disloyalty of parties within the movement. The Soviet Union, like the United States, was said to be confused by the nationalism of new nations and disillusioned by the seeming irrelevance of Communism to the aspirations of the Third World. The result, as the New York Times informed its readers during the Iranian crisis earlier this year, was that “the Soviet Union is becoming a mostly conservative force in world affairs . . . burdened with the defense of far-flung political and economic interests.”

While this view of Soviet Communism in retreat is undoubtedly characteristic of the thinking of the present administration, it may come as something of a surprise to the leaders of the Soviet Union themselves. A series of developments in the past two years indicates that Moscow, far from tiring of its responsibilities as a global power and leader of a universal ideological movement, has entered into a new phase of support for orthodox Marxist-Leninist parties, and that these parties have reciprocated by showing great loyalty to the Soviet Union. Since 1977, three countries in or near a strategically crucial area of the world have fallen under the control of slavishly pro-Soviet governments: Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and South Yemen. A fourth, Iraq, seems to have been the intended victim of a Communist coup which failed only because of the suspiciousness and ruthlessness of its present leaders.

What is remarkable about these four recent cases is that the governments which were targeted by the new Communist groups were all left-wing nationalist regimes of a type very common in the Third World. Professing to be neutralist or non-aligned in the East-West struggle, they inevitably tended to lean toward the Soviet Union and would unfailingly vote with the Soviet bloc at the UN. By no stretch of the imagination could any of these regimes be considered threats to the security of the USSR. On the other hand, each to differing degrees failed to cooperate in Moscow’s efforts to expand its influence throughout Africa and the Middle East. The fact that the Soviets were sufficiently dissatisfied to want to replace each of these regimes with a more ideologically compatible and therefore loyal one, suggests that Moscow’s objectives are considerably less defensive and more ambitious than is nowadays commonly thought.

Soviet interest in and use of Third World Communist parties is hardly new. During the late 40’s and early 50’s, when one could still speak meaningfully of a Communist International dominated by Moscow, Soviet strategy relied almost exclusively on local party organizations to accomplish its purposes. Policy debates centered on whether local parties should or should not ally themselves with bourgeois or social-democratic groups, and not whether Communist parties should be used at all. After World War II, Stalin looked upon the leaders of newly independent nations like Nehru of India and Naguib of Egypt as neocolonial puppets, and for the most part wrote off the possibility of exercising substantial influence through them. As a practical policy, what might be called the “party emphasis” of the late Stalin years was often barren and counterproductive. The universal distrust with which Moscow was viewed was not offset by any remarkable Communist gains.

Moscow’s casting aside of local parties in favor of the cultivation of better ties with existing nationalist (but non-Communist) governments coincided with Khrushchev’s rise to power in the mid-50’s. It was first marked by Soviet support for the Afro-Asian conference of nonaligned nations held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, and the arms deal between Czechoslovakia and Nasser’s Arab nationalist regime in Egypt later that year. This shift in strategy reflected two considerations. The first was the tremendous optimism Soviet leaders were beginning to feel concerning the potential benefits to be derived from exploiting Third World nationalist resentment against the West for a variety of real or imagined wrongs committed during the period of European colonialism. Khrushchev was the first to point out publicly, at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, that whatever the internal mode of socioeconomic organization or ideology of new nations and national-liberation movements, their anti-imperialism would guarantee a large area of common interests with the Soviet Union in foreign policy. Hopeful articles began to appear in the Soviet press during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s arguing that the alliance would not be merely a temporary tactical one, but that the “national” revolution in the colonial or neocolonial world would evolve naturally into a “social” revolution which would create a permanent community of interests.

The second consideration leading to the downgrading of Communist parties in Soviet strategy was the proliferation of heterodox Marxist-Leninist ideologies in the early 1960’s. The old Communist International derived its “monolithic unity” from the Stalinist monopoly over left-wing ideology and the physical control that Moscow exerted over local parties. Neither of these survived the expansion of the movement after the war. The Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions produced right-and left-wing deviations that in many areas of the developing world were more attractive models than the Stalinist one. The Soviets, moreover, were still too weak militarily to enforce their writ in the factional infighting that soon consumed most major Communist movements in the Third World. It was frequently the case, then, that a vulnerable, dependent nationalist regime would serve Moscow’s interests more loyally than an independent Communist one.

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Actual Soviet policy toward Third World Communist parties, however, was somewhat more complicated than these shifts would indicate. At the same time that Khrushchev sought to buy the good will of established nationalist leaders with arms transfers and economic aid, he also tried to protect the position of local Communists. But when Nasser in the United Arab Republic and Kassem in Iraq set about suppressing what they regarded as subversive Communist threats to their regimes, Khrushchev found himself caught in a highly embarrassing dilemma. This dilemma remained unresolved until shortly after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, when the Soviet leadership decided that local Communist parties would be sacrificed where necessary in favor of good relations with existing governments. The first fruits of this new line were evident the following year, when Moscow instructed the Egyptian Communist party to disband—an almost unheard of occurrence—and to join Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union as individuals. In other countries, local Communist parties were urged to form united “fronts” with the regimes. Thus during the fifteen years between 1961 and 1975, Communist parties in Africa and the Middle East were for the most part quiescent, and Communist subversion was not a major problem (one exception was the attempted coup by the Sudanese Communists in 1971).

There would be good cause to expect that this “non-party” emphasis of the 1960’s was coming under serious review even in the absence of empirical evidence concerning a new trend back to reliance on Communist parties. The first reason has to do with what emerged as the extreme unreliability of most of Moscow’s Third World nationalist clients. While there is no doubt that Moscow’s decision to cultivate these regimes through arms transfers and economic aid served Soviet purposes in many important ways, it is nevertheless equally clear that Moscow’s original expectations about the direction of its clients’ political development were disappointed. The first signs of a reappraisal of the policy occurred after a sudden series of setbacks that befell Khrushchev-era allies in the mid-60’s, such as the fall of Sukharno in Indonesia, Ben Bella in Algeria, Keita in Mali, and Nkrumah in Ghana. Critical theoretical articles appeared in Soviet journals during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s questioning whether it had been worth sacrificing loyal Communists for the sake of regimes of such questionable staying power and pointing out that even those regimes which were managing to survive remained retrograde, incompetent, and by no means ready to adopt “scientific socialism.”

These doubts could only have been reinforced by another round of reverses which occurred in the early 1970’s, primarily in the Middle East, where an overwhelming share of Soviet military and economic resources earmarked for the Third World had been invested. The outstanding failure was Egypt, a country in which almost $4 billion in military assistance donated over more than twenty years failed to prevent Sadat’s defection to the American camp in 1974; this was followed by cancellation of Soviet port privileges and abrogation of the Friendship and Cooperation Treaty in 1976. Moscow’s control over arms supplies proved to be a remarkably ineffective tool for influencing Egyptian policy: neither increased arms aid (in the spring and summer of 1973) nor an arms embargo (from late 1974 on) could induce Sadat to abandon, in the first case, what Moscow regarded as an adventurist course and, in the second, a capitulationist one.

So too with other radical Soviet clients whose nationalism has proven a substantial obstacle to Moscow’s military penetration of Africa and the Middle East. Syria, for all the intransigent anti-imperialist rhetoric of its Ba’athist government, flaunted its independence in 1976 by sending an armored column into Lebanon in direct contravention of Soviet wishes on the eve of a visit to Damascus by Soviet Premier Kosygin. As in the Egyptian case, Soviet control over the arms pipeline failed to prevent Damascus from crushing the Palestinian-Lebanese Left when it saw fit. The Syrians also openly dissented from Soviet policy in the Horn of Africa and substantially increased their trade with the West. Algeria, Libya, Iraq, and India have all refused to grant the Soviets military facilities, and in November 1977 Somalia closed down the naval base in Berbera in retaliation for Soviet support of Ethiopia.

Another reason to expect renewed Soviet interest in international Communism is that Moscow has for all practical purposes won its rivalry with Peking for hegemony over the movement. This is above all due to Moscow’s superior ability to supply parties loyal to it with military and political support. The example of Cuba is quite instructive. On a purely ideological level, Cuba’s Guevarist doctrines were closer in many ways to Maoism than to Soviet-style Marxism, and all during the 1960’s Castro attempted to stake out a course in foreign and domestic policy quite independent of Moscow. But severe economic difficulties eventually forced Havana into line. By 1970-71 Cuban criticism of Soviet foreign policy had ended and the DGI, or Cuban intelligence service, was reorganized and in effect taken over by the KGB. Extensive Cuban cooperation with the Russians in Africa was one of the consequences of this development. Non-ruling Communist parties, mindful of this example, must understand that whatever the attractions of Maoism, only the Soviet Union can supply them with the weapons and aid necessary for survival should they come to power. The pro-Peking offshoots of the Communist movements left over from the 1960’s are at best marginal contenders for power.

Indeed, China’s problem may run even deeper, particularly after its invasion of Vietnam. Apart from China’s inability to overcome its relative military and economic weakness, its ideological position has been steadily eroding for over a decade. China’s global anti-Soviet campaign has increasingly led to open support for right-wing regimes like Pakistan or Iran under the Shah—not to speak of the United States—in a way that is bound to hurt its credibility with leftists in the Third World. Maoism as a domestic system may also lose much of its appeal if Deng Xiaoping succeeds in his apparent efforts to make Chinese Communism yet more revisionist than the arch-revisionist Russians themselves. Soviet-style Communism may not be any more attractive than it was in the mid-60’s, but it is coming to be seen as the only realistic alternative within the movement.

A final reason to expect Moscow to show greater interest in Third World Communism lies in its increasing ability to project military power around the world. Western analysts have tended to think in terms of Moscow’s ability to assist established national governments fighting conventional wars, but Soviet power can also be used to support local parties locked in internal power struggles. The first instance of this was the 1975-76 Soviet-Cuban intervention on behalf of Agostinho Neto’s MPLA in Angola. The MPLA was a Marxist-Leninist group into which the original Angolan Communist party had been incorporated; the direct use of Cuban combat troops was instrumental in helping the MPLA defeat the Western- and Chinese-backed UNITA and FNLA nationalist groups.

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II

Given all these considerations, it should not surprise us to learn that the Soviet Union has ceased holding back local Communist bids for power, and now has hopes of securing influence in the Third World in a more reliable and long-term way by installing regimes tied to it by bonds of ideological loyalty. Recent events in Afghanistan, South Yemen, Iraq, and Ethiopia indicate that a major shift in Soviet strategy has in fact occurred.

Among the cases representing the new trend in Soviet policy, Afghanistan has been very much in the news as a result of the blatant Communist putsch there and the violent Muslim reaction it engendered.¹ While the Afghan revolution does not promise to be a Soviet success, it is nonetheless highly significant for what it reveals about Moscow’s intentions. Prior to the April 1978 coup that overthrew the leftist government of Mohammed Daud, this landlocked country lying on the USSR’s southern border had hardly been a threat to the Soviet Union or unfriendly to Soviet interests in southern Asia. Spurned by Washington in the early 1950’s, Afghanistan negotiated an arms agreement with Moscow in 1956 and has been exclusively supplied with Russian equipment ever since. Afghanistan served Moscow’s purposes in many ways. Like other “nations” in the region, its political frontiers did not coincide with existing ethnic divisions, and the country’s predominantly Pushtun leadership refused to recognize the validity of the border with Pakistan that left many of their kinsmen in the latter country’s North West Frontier Province. The Soviets found this irredentist movement, as well as a secondary one concerning the Baluchis in Pakistan and Iran, a potential source of instability for two American CENTO allies. Under the most optimistic scenario, pressure from Afghanistan and India would lead to the breakup of Pakistan along ethnic lines, paving the way for a pro-Soviet client state in Baluchistan and direct Soviet naval access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

For all of Daud’s leftist and pro-Soviet inclinations, however, Afghanistan was not Outer Mongolia: its self-proclaimed nonalignment had a real if limited meaning. This was most evident in the three or four years preceding the coup, when Daud abandoned his strident irredentism and moved toward a degree of rapprochement with his neighbors, Iran and Pakistan. Daud signed various economic agreements with the Shah, and officially dropped Afghanistan’s claims on Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province in recognition of the mutually destructive nature of the border fighting that persisted as late as 1976. What the Afghan Prime Minister sought was genuine nonalignment, and to this end he was actively encouraged by such charter members of the Third World neutralist movement as India and Yugoslavia. What Daud did could not possibly be construed as a threat to Soviet security or a move into the American sphere; rather, he created inconveniences for Soviet policy by dropping the Pushtun and Baluchi issues and ending Afghanistan’s role as an instrument for the expansion of Soviet influence into South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

The two Afghan Communist parties, Percham and Khalq, came to power in two days of heavy fighting on April 27-28, 1978, during which Daud and several members of his family were killed. The Soviets loudly denied any role in the takeover. Appropriately enough, this story was believed only by American officials and academic experts who for the past two decades have built their careers on debunking the “myth” that Moscow has any influence or control at all over the world Communist movement. Yet a great deal of circumstantial evidence has convinced those close to the scene that the takeover was encouraged—if not actually planned in a tactical sense—by Moscow. The Soviets recognized the new regime immediately, and proceeded to flood the country with trade missions and technical advisers. The new Premier, Nur Mohammed Taraki, quickly reopened the Pushtun and Baluchi issues, reversing the conciliatory course begun by Daud. All contacts with pro-Western countries were broken off; in their place came a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union signed by the new Afghanistan in November 1978. Altogether, a Communist Afghanistan has insured a regime in Kabul that would not be subject to fits of national self-assertion and independence.

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The Communist takeover of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) in June 1978 differed from the one in Afghanistan in that the leaders of the new government had occupied high positions in the old one. It was in many ways less a coup than an internal power struggle given decisive assistance from the outside by the Soviet Union and its allies, followed by an extensive purge of the losing faction. Once again, a pro-Soviet regime was replaced by one yet more pro-Soviet, and ideological orthodoxy proved to be a central theme in determining the nature of Moscow’s involvement.

South Yemen was of course an avowedly Marxist-Leninist state before the coup. In 1969, it made a decisive break with the fashionable currents of Arab nationalism by stressing the internationalist character of its ideology. The practical impact of this doctrine was evident in the fact that South Yemen, alone among Arab states, supported Marxist but Christian Ethiopia against its Muslim opponents in Somalia and Eritrea.² The port of Aden became a major logistics and staging base for the Soviet and Cuban intervention on Ethiopia’s behalf in late 1977, at a time when such radical Soviet clients as Syria and Iraq were actively participating in the war on the side of Somalia.

The threat that South Yemen might develop into something other than a docile instrument of Moscow’s African policies came in the person of the Republic’s President, Selim Rubai Ali, who undertook several hesitant measures to give some reality to South Yemen’s professions of being “nonaligned.” He was opposed to, though unable to stop, South Yemen’s role in supporting Ethiopia. He attempted to end his country’s isolation from the rest of the Arab world by initiating some cautious contacts with Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1976 and 1977, he succeeded in winning from his conservative neighbors a small amount of foreign aid to lessen the almost total dependence of his country’s desperately poor economy on the Soviet bloc. Rubai Ali maintained some ties with Communist China and did not join in Moscow’s ritualistic denunciations of Chinese policy. As in the case of Mohammed Daud, his policies were disagreeable but not seriously threatening to Soviet interests; at most they represented a potential pole of opposition to the resolutely pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban line of other leaders within South Yemen’s ruling party.

Rubai Ali and two of his followers were executed on June 26, 1978, in a bizarre sequence of events that began with the assassination of North Yemen’s President, Ahmad Hussein Ghashmi, by a bomb-carrying diplomat from South Yemen. At the time of his execution, there were over 5,500 Soviet, Cuban, and East German advisers and troops in the country, and more were brought back from Ethiopia to help suppress units loyal to the President. The East Germans had been busy refurbishing South Yemen’s police apparatus, and it is hard to believe that they did not know about the plans to assassinate Rubai Ali beforehand.³ Indeed, they may have been active participants and instigators of the conspiracy, which after all was nothing more than a purge of right-wing deviationists so common in Communist countries. Rubai Ali was succeeded as President by the former Premier, Abd al-Fattah Ismail, a man whose career was shaped in struggles against the Nasserite or Arab-nationalist wing of the party. His speeches and statements at party conferences show him to be a resolute Stalinist, incongruous as this may seem in the context of gat-chewing Yemeni culture. It is amusing to note how Western correspondents have taken South Yemen’s protestations of national independence at face value, as if the regime’s first priority were to distance itself from Moscow. The truth of the matter is that South Yemen’s new leadership has elevated loyalty to the international socialist movement headed by the Soviet Union to a matter of principle.

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The third case is that of Iraq, where serious evidence exists to suggest that the Iraqi Communist party (ICP) was preparing to stage a coup against the Ba’ath government in the spring of 1978. Although this abortive takeover attempt has received relatively little attention in the West, it is the most revealing of the significance and direction of the new trend in Soviet foreign policy.

Iraq is not a relative backwater like Afghanistan or South Yemen. With substantial armed forces that are now, after the decline of Iran, indisputably the most powerful in the Persian Gulf, with its geographical centrality to both the Arab-Israeli and Persian Gulf theaters, and, above all, with the enormous oil reserves that make it the fourth largest OPEC oil producer, Iraq bids fair to becoming the predominant state in the Arab world. Indeed, one can argue that with the isolation of Egypt in the wake of the recent peace treaty with Israel, Iraq has already emerged as the central arbiter of Arab affairs. For these reasons alone any Soviet machinations to install a Communist regime in Baghdad should be of vital interest to the West.

There have, of course, been other Soviet-sponsored coups against strategically important regimes in the Third World that failed. In April 1978, for example, President Siad Barre of Somalia uncovered a conspiracy within the armed forces led by pro-Soviet officers who were unhappy with Barre’s expulsion of the Russian military from that country during the war with Ethiopia. It is not surprising that the Soviets should have urged their sympathizers to act, in view of the fact that Barre had expelled Somalia’s Soviet advisers the previous October in retaliation for Moscow’s aid to Ethiopia, and was busily propagandizing against the Soviet presence in Africa.

But it is much more surprising that Moscow should have sponsored a coup against Iraq, since Baghdad has long been regarded as Moscow’s most loyal ally in the Middle East. The ruling Ba’ath party espouses a radical anti-imperialist doctrine that is often more intransigent and extreme than that of the Soviet Union itself. Iraq has served Soviet interests repeatedly—by nationalizing Western oil companies and acting as a price hawk within OPEC; by purchasing Soviet arms with hard currencies; by supporting various radical subversive movements around the Persian Gulf; and by giving Syria direct military assistance in the 1973 war with Israel.

Nonetheless, the Soviets had certain reasons for being dissatisfied with Baghdad after 1975, among them the latter’s growing trade with the West and its rapprochement with the Shah of Iran. The Iraqi Communist party in March 1978 published an open attack on the Ba’ath regime for its deviations from the Soviet line that was very similar to a statement made by the Khalq/Percham United Front shortly before the Afghan coup a month later. This audacious challenge may have been the opening salvo in the ICP’s bid for power. In any event, it indicated the Communists’ high level of self-confidence vis-à-vis the Ba’athists. Unfortunately for themselves and for Moscow, they miscalculated: in May the government began an extensive purge of Communists in the army, which was still going on more than a year later. The Ba’ath was quite explicit in its accusations against the Soviet Union; party strongman Saddam Hussein became a veritable fount of anti-Communist invective during a period when mutual Iraqi and Soviet unhappiness over the Camp David accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty would otherwise have dictated a high degree of cooperation and an outward show of solidarity. If a group as favorably disposed to the Soviet Union as the Iraqi Ba’ath claims that Moscow was plotting against it, it hardly behooves outside Western observers to disagree.

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Ethiopia, the final case, differs from the first three in that there is no evidence to suggest that Moscow played a role in putting the Communist regime there into power in the first place. While the Soviets apparently did support Major Mengistu Haile Mariam during the power struggle that ended in a successful coup on February 3, 1977, that choice was not dictated by ideological considerations. Mengistu is in many respects a second-rate Communist. A parvenu military officer who, like Castro, declared his adherence to Marxism-Leninism only after he had come to power, Mengistu did not represent a civilian party organization. His early opponents all claimed to be Marxist-Leninists and in some respects would have been more ideologically acceptable partners from a Soviet standpoint.

Where ideology did seem to play a significant role was in Moscow’s decision to back Ethiopia against Somalia and the Eritrean national-liberation movement in mid- to late 1977. This move was highly risky for several reasons. It amounted to a sellout of both Somalia and the Eritreans, who had previously been Soviet clients. In the case of Somalia, Moscow was in danger of losing a concrete and strategically important naval facility in Berbera in return for the vague possibility of a future replacement along the Eritrean coast when and if the central Ethiopian government reestablished its control there. By betraying the Eritreans, Moscow alienated its radical Arab clients and gave the Saudis an opening for increased influence in the Horn. Quite apart from these external conflicts, it was not at all clear that Mengistu would survive within Ethiopia. The governing Derg faced simultaneous separatist movements undertaken by several different ethnic groups, as well as insurgency campaigns mounted by dissident factions on both the Left and Right.

There were some practical factors working in favor of support for Ethiopia: it was a much larger and ultimately more influential country than Somalia (provided it held together), and it had the backing of the non-Arab members of the Organization for African Unity. But ideological considerations obviously played a fairly important role in the final Soviet decision. While President Mohammed Siad Barre has claimed since 1969 that Somalia was a Marxist state, his dedication to the Soviet Union was overshadowed by a commitment to greater Somali nationalism and to Islam. The task of uniting the Somalis of the Ogaden desert, Djibouti, and Kenya was written into the Somali constitution and presented something of an obstacle to long-term cooperation with the Soviet Union. Just as Arab nationalism made the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties unpredictable clients, so Somali nationalism threatened to draw the Soviet Union into conflicts in which it had no inherent interest. In the words of a Pravda commentator, the Somali invasion of the Ogaden proved “the pernicious consequences of the renunciation of revolutionary internationalist principles and the lapsing into nationalism.” Mengistu and the Derg, by contrast, did not regard themselves primarily as Ethiopian nationalists, in part because there is no such thing as an Ethiopian national identity. However imperfect their Marxism, they at least promised to be more reliable allies. As one Soviet diplomat explained, “we feel the Ethiopian revolution is more genuine.”⁴

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The aftereffects of the takeovers make it clear why the Russians wanted to put their own people in power. Third World nationalism, while serving as a vehicle for Soviet expansionism, also places limits on the Soviets’ ability to manipulate local politics because it is at its base quite xenophobic. Ba’athist Iraq had never permitted the Soviet navy to construct a base in Umm Qasr at the head of the Persian Gulf, whereas Communist South Yemen has allowed itself to be transformed into a virtual logistics facility for Soviet-Cuban activities against its fellow Muslims. It took two massive defeats at the hands of Israel, in 1967 and 1970, to induce Nasser to invite large numbers of Soviet advisers into Egypt; the new Marxist-Leninist regimes, by contrast, have accepted Soviet, Cuban, and East German military and technical experts from the outset.

The problem for the West is not simply that Communist gains in these apparently remote countries threaten specific Western interests, but that they have the potential to become cumulative and self-reinforcing. The Soviets are in the process of constructing what amounts to a multinational military infrastructure which can be used as a base of operations for further expansion. The symbiosis between Ethiopia and South Yemen is a perfect example of what Avigdor Haselkorn has called the growing “Soviet collective security system.”⁵ South Yemen proved indispensable as a conduit for Soviet and Cuban assistance to Ethiopia, with the ultimate result that a Marxist-Leninist government consolidated its rule in Addis Ababa. Conversely, when Rubai Ali threatened to draw South Yemen out of the system the following year by restricting Soviet access to Aden, Cuban troops stationed in Ethiopia were brought back and used to purge him and his followers. The two Marxist governments functioned far more effectively together than either would have alone. The Soviets, who have directed the construction of this system from the center, are thereby relieved of the risky possibility of intervening with their own forces. Not only do the Soviets and their Cuban allies enjoy an extraordinary freedom of maneuver within this system, they acquire new and more reliable proxy forces as well: witness the role of South Yemen in menacing Saudi Arabia in the spring of 1979, or recent Afghan threats against Pakistan and Iran.

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III

It is too early to say how successful the Soviets will be in this round of the conflict. To some extent they have already overplayed their hand: the Iraqis and Somalis have been seriously alienated, and Taraki’s days seem numbered in Afghanistan. But Americans would do well to remember that these results have come about only because there were others—an incongruous collection of Pakistanis, Saudis, Chinese, and Iranians—who were willing to bear the burden of containing Soviet Communism. In the future, they may not have the ability, or more likely the willingness, to act on our behalf without greater support and recognition. What we have seen in the past two years is a foretaste of what the international arena will be like in the face of further American retreat: not a more diverse and independent world, but one increasingly accessible to Soviet influence and military power.

The first step is to recognize that a problem even exists. Over the past two decades there has occurred in this country what might be called a slow process of self-Finlandization, whereby our expectations as to what constitutes normal or acceptable Soviet behavior in the world have steadily risen, while our view of our own sphere of legitimate action has continuously shrunk. This tendency was evident in a recent article in the Washington Post by Selig Harrison, one of the few resident American experts on Afghanistan and South Asia. Harrison pleaded for the United States to stay out of any involvement in Afghanistan on the grounds that the Shah of Iran and not Moscow was ultimately responsible for the coup against Daud. He did not even try to prove that the Soviets weren’t actively involved; instead he argued that they had a right to install a Communist regime in Kabul in response to certain intolerable provocations by an American ally, the Shah. These provocations included economic aid, trade, cultural exchange, and help from the Savak to suppress the Afghan Communists. In other words, the Soviets may legitimately demand that Third World nations cease to maintain normal relations with pro-American neighbors and forbid them to take measures to protect themselves from Communist subversion.

That such arguments can be made, and taken seriously—indeed, that there has been so little outcry against the sudden mushrooming of Communist regimes around the periphery of the Western world’s oil supply—indicate how far the process of self-Finlandization has gone. To some extent the new Soviet strategy is the result of the inherent weakness of Soviet influence and appeal. The West, therefore, has only itself to blame for whatever vitality and success the new Communist International has shown.

¹ I am indebted to Professor Hannah Negaran for much of the contents of this section.

² Libya also aided Ethiopia, but only in the interest of pursuing Colonel Qaddafi's personal vendetta against Jaafar Numeiry in the Sudan.

³ It is significant that Moscow seems to be attempting to assert its hegemony over “fraternal” Communist parties through the reimposition of direct police controls. The African operations of the East German intelligence service (MFS) are now second in size only to the KGB. The MFS has helped reorganize the police apparatus of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, the Sudan, and South Yemen. This “help” is double-edged: while it increases the existing government's control over its own population, it also serves as a source of intelligence and infiltration of agents directly responsible to Moscow. In the event of a power struggle, MFS control over the police could be used as a direct instrument of physical coercion.

⁴ Quoted in Marina and David Ottaway, Ethiopia: Empire in Revolution (Africana Publishing Company, 1978), p. 170.

⁵ The Evolution of Soviet Security Strategy: 1965-1975 (Crane and Russak, 1978).