Foreign News: Warm-Water Friendship

• Share

Fifteen years ago, when the Nazis and the Communists were such fine false friends, Stalin and Hitler agreed on the direction in which Russia really should expand: down towards the Persian Gulf. In looking southward, the Russian was echoing an ambition as old as Peter the Great's push for a warm-water port.

Last week, their expansion in Europe contained, the Russians were elbowing their way into the Middle East with a great display of interest. Commanding this new Soviet push are not Red Army marshals but propagandists and trade commissars with order books, credit vouchers and a glib line.

The Soviet sale of arms to Egypt's military junta is only the most spectacular of the Kremlin's penetrations. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Afghanistan are considering similar offers. Last week Soviet commissars signed a treaty of friendship with Yemen and promised to support Libya for a seat in the U.N. The Hungarians are shipping freight cars to Egypt, Poland is wooing Ceylon. East Germany is at work on Lebanon. Czechoslovakia, the most advanced industrial nation in the Soviet orbit, spearheads the trade offensive. The Czechs are providing spare parts for guns to Afghanistan, trucks to Jordan, tractors to Sudan.

Danger in Egypt. The key to the Middle East is restless, revolutionary Egypt, and it is there that the Reds have worked hardest. Hungary is shipping the Egyptians between 50 and 90 locomotives and freight cars to go with them; Russian tankers have delivered the first of some 500,000 tons of Rumanian and Russian oil. The Kremlin has even offered to help build the giant new Aswan dam, which Premier Abdel Nasser believes his country must have or starve (Nasser has already signed up an English engineering firm to design the dam, but so far has been unable to get money out of the World Bank to build it).

Soviet willingness to buy Egypt's cotton at uneconomic prices gives its salesmen a vital edge. Thus a French firm that was a low bidder on a contract for diesel engines lost out when Hungary promised to accept payment for the job in cotton. All told, cotton shipments account for 90% of Egypt's total exports. This year the Soviet bloc will take well over half of them.

Welcome Contrasts. The Russian eco nomic penetration of the Middle East has the U.S. State Department worried, and with reason. But some of the journalistic hand-wringing going on last week was, in effect, handing the Russians a greater victory than they have yet won. A single U.S. construction firm, Morrison-Knudsen, has put up more projects in southern Afghanistan than all the flashy grain elevators and oil tanks put up by the Russians in Kabul. The Russians have a talent for getting more propaganda value out of their shadows than the U.S. does out' of its substance.

Some nations have already found out that though the Reds make big trading offers, they are not always able to deliver the goods. The London Economist is convinced that "Russian competition in economic aid may even in time provide some contrasts that will work out to Western advantage."