Contrary to a widespread belief, the arms embargo by the western democracies (including the US) did hurt the Spanish Republic: "Arms could
not 'always be obtained for gold or hard currency': on the contrary, the Republicans rarely obtained more than a fraction of what they needed and even then only after long delays and at a terrible cost...they were faced by a wall of blackmail wherever they turned: by ministers of government, chiefs-of-staff and other officers and officials in more than thirty countries who demanded bribes of between £5,000 ($25,000) and £45,000 ($275,000) a time, in 1937 money, for their signatures on dubious export licenses. Below them were officials down to harbour- and station-masters who not only demanded bribes but found pretexts to delay transportation in order to charge accumulating 'storage fees,' of which one, it may be remembered, rose to as much as £10,000 ($50,000). How often, too, the ministers and officials changed their minds, found ways to withhold delivery of the material and to refuse to return the money! And below them again were the arms dealers, brokers and other go-betweens. Yet such behaviour appears trivial beside that of the Soviets, whose defrauding of the Spanish government of millions of dollars, by secretly manipulating the exchange rates when setting the prices for the goods they were supplying, belied everything they professed to stand for..." Gerald Howson,
Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, pp. 250-251. See my discussion of the US arms embargo in particular at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-us-lifts-arms-embargo-on-spanish-republic.425958/