Foreign Relations: Summit in Smalltown

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Particularly since the 1962 Cuban missile debacle, which helped hasten the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow has played for smaller stakes at great cost and scant return (see box). One investment it could not liquidate, however, was the Middle East. With the decline of Western influence and the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, the volatile, petroliferous Moslem world became an irresistible and comparatively safe target for Russia's rulers. Their main goal, in the Middle East as elsewhere, was to displace U.S. influence. The ultimate cost of Russia's aid to the Arab world was between $3 billion and $4 billion.

Controlled Trouble. Uri Ra'anan, an Israeli Kremlinologist who is professor of world politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, observes that "ironically, the Soviets were not interested in whether these countries actually gained their aspirations. Russia was interested in giving arms, but not in their being used. The Russians found, as always, that it is easier to get in than to stay in."

Even though it became the custodial power of the Arab world, the Soviet Union found that it could not control events. While the Soviets had every reason to welcome turbulence in the area, they could not restrain their clients from provoking an explosion that eventually threatened a direct Russian-U.S. military confrontation—which might well have occurred if the tide of battle three weeks ago had flowed differently and Israel had been faced with extinction.

In their defeat, the Arabs found a scapegoat in the U.S., but they also vented their spleen on their Kremlin friends. "The balance of terror," complained the Algiers daily El Moudjahid, has prompted the Russians to "put the preservation of peace before every other consideration" and to relegate their "support for the liberation movements to second place." Even East Germany's Walter Ulbricht was alarmed over Moscow's refusal to risk war. "The nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States," he said, "is to be used as an excuse to start wars of aggression just below the nuclear threshold to eliminate progressive governments."

Thus the pyrotechnic efforts by Kosygin to prove that Moscow meets its obligations. "The Soviet Union," he promised at the U.N., "will undertake all measures within its power, both in the United Nations and outside, in order to achieve the elimination of the consequences of aggression."

Duplex Diplomacy. Did he mean it? As at least token proof, Russian-made MIGs—more than 100 of them—have arrived in the U.A.R. and Syria to begin replacing the estimated 400 planes destroyed by Israel. Another Cairo arrival was Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny, the third man, with Kosygin and Brezhnev, in the Kremlin's collegial leadership. "The imperialists and their agents imagine that we have come here to exchange small talk," Podgorny told President Gamal Abdel Nasser. "But we will prove to them that we have come here for more than talk. We have come here to frustrate the designs of all conspirators."