No Cold War - The Middle East

[Adam Parsons]

After looking at some of the preliminaries to Gwen's "Soviet Deng Xiaopeng" timeline, I began to wonder about what effects signifigantly reduced tensions would have in the Middle East, one of the main fronts of the Cold War. My own readings suggest that the Arab nations were receptive to Soviet assistance, but that they were by no means under Moscow's thumb.

So, anyway, I'm just wondering about some of the generic trends that would result if the Soviets were not in the business of supplying large amounts of military equipment and treasure to the Arab nations in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, beyond what is absolutely bare-minimum necessary for the security of the USSR.

Thoughts?

 

[aktarian]

Interesting thing is that first large scale purchase of arms (by Egypt) wasn't from SU but CSSR. If Egyptians can't buy weapons from communist states then US isn't likelly to sell Israelis advanced weapons as well (they were reluctant as is). So Israel will likelly stick to buying French equipment and Egypt might end up buying British stuff. Jordan did. Don't know about Syria though.

neither side willg et top-notch equipment. Modern, but not best available.