ABSTRACT
For the Soviet Union, the Middle East is almost certainly the most important region in the Third World. Since the break with Egypt in the mid-1970s, Syria had been the most important Soviet ally and client in the Middle East, and one of Mikhail Gorbachev's first high-level guests was President Hafiz al-Asad, who visited Moscow in June 1985. For the transformation of Soviet behavior in the Middle East was neither as steady nor as unambiguous as a static and superficial comparison of 1984 and 1990/1991 might suggest. Soviet Muslims, as Muslims, may be abstractly sympathetic to the Palestinians, but unless they are swept up by a wave of fundamentalist fervor, they will probably be no more energized by the Israel-Arab conflict than are Muslims in Turkey, Malaysia, or Senegal. The military and financial dimensions of new political thinking were being conveyed to other Syrian officials in rather striking terms.
