Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

So Turkey has to take measures to be prepared if they are able.

So regarding Spain, will it stay a United States ally ore will it go fully neutral.

Ok, Papandreu it's the usual charismatic idiot but except a big facepalm the rest of the continent and the USA will simply wait the new goverment to reverse the decision, the shit will hit the fan quickly, at least economically speaking as any other financial partner will demand further (costly) assurance for any economical and political agreement...basically you don't get out of a multinational economical treaty after a couple of months without repercussion on your international credibility (expecially if who you had just irritated are your biggest economic patner).
At least the French will be happy as they were not really too keen to let them in, as they considered them not ready. Spain, formally becoming a member of NATO or not doubt will remain neutral, at minimum she will remain very pro-western in his neutrality, plus everyone in Spain want to enter in the EEC regardless of the party (it was waited till 1986 due to size of Spain economy, her being not advanced as the rest of the EEC and the complication regarding the Common agricoltural policy).

On the european side, the EEC will want to answer at the Greece 'defection' to show that the european project is still on, sure Athens decision will not have that great pratical consequences, still from a PR pow, it's important.

Papandreu while being one of the most influential and important political figure in Greece, was not the smartest regarding thing outside his 'garden'

It's a case that anyone in America and Europe will try to avoid; it will be a PR nightmare of epic proportion and everybody knows that a goverment born from a coup cannot be accepted in the alliance, agree or disagree Papandreu goverment has been freely elected.
Said that i doubt that getting out of NATO and EEC will have made PASOK a lot of friends in the military and the business community, after the initial afterglow of nationalism had worn off and reality had took her place, expecially the first time things get 'complicated' in the Cyprus and Aegean disputes

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November 1981:

Saddam learnt how important he was to Andropov and that wasn’t very much overall. The Soviets showed him how little they cared for Iraq when their own interests were affected: Moscow’s interests were paramount first and foremost. Iraq’s dictator was surprised by this. He shouldn’t have been yet he really was. Alas, it you lie down with a snake, you should expect to get bitten. Everyone else understood that. Saddam had thought he was special but he wasn’t. Once his swallowing up of Kuwait was complete and the former country returned to its rightful place as part of Iraq, Saddam sought to restore relations which had been cut with the West during the summer; relations with his fellow Arabs would be addressed afterwards. He found that Western Europe, parts of Asia and the United States all refused to buy Iraqi oil again until Kuwait was vacated by Iraqi troops and the Emir restored to his throne. They were united on this too. Saddam took that as an opening bargaining position for he knew they wanted Iraqi (and Kuwaiti) oil because they were dependent upon it. It turned out that both his beliefs there were false. He wouldn’t give up Kuwait and the West wouldn’t buy his oil. He went running to the Soviets. Do something about this, he told Primakov, make them buy our oil again. His Soviet contact asked him how Saddam wanted the Soviet Union to do such a thing. Force them, Saddam said; he was asked how Moscow was supposed to do that. Even France didn’t want Iraqi oil anymore and made the switch elsewhere like everyone else was doing. It had been an article of faith as far as Saddam was concerned that the weak and divided West would come around to recognising his control over Kuwait and come running back to their favourite oil supplier. How wrong he had been. Without oil revenue, Iraq was going to be in a difficult situation in the long run. That money paid for so much that Saddam needed to keep Iraq prosperous and (relatively) free from internal troubles. What was he going to do without it? The gold stolen from Kuwait could only be spent once. Then he found out afterwards that it was from the Soviets, his friends and ally who had helped persuade him to go to war, that many in the West were now buying their oil from if it wasn’t from the Saudis or other OPEC countries (Iraq ended up suspended from that organisation too). They’d stole his customers.

The Soviets then really turned on him come November. A formal request was made from Tehran that the Iranian People’s Democratic Republic wished for the removal of foreign troops from its sovereign soil. Like the Soviets, the Iraqis were inside Iran: Iran politely asked both nations to pull out their forces. The Soviets had fought alongside the Iranians across the Zagros Mountains through the summer and defeated the last of the rebel strongholds there. The Iranians were up on their feet and behaving like good communists, subservient to Moscow too. The request was followed by an acceptance by the Soviets where they openly announced that their 4th & 32nd Armies would be leaving Iran in a staged withdrawal through 1982… certain Soviet bases – joint facilities supposedly – would remain established on Iranian soil though. Saddam queried the request first with Tehran where he said that Iraq’s position was that Iran wasn’t in a secure enough internal situation and therefore Iraqi troops should remain to help secure the peace. The Iranians reaffirmed their request though this time phrased it in the manner of a demand. Saddam questioned this with Moscow: just who did the Iranians think that they were? The response came that Iran was a firm Soviet ally. Saddam had plans for the areas of Iran under Iraqi control, plans to make them part of Iraq. He informed both Moscow and Tehran than in the areas under Iraqi control, there was a will of the people there to remain under Iraqi control. That didn’t fly in neither the Soviet nor Iranian capitals. Both governments knew what Saddam wanted and neither was willing to see that occur. Saddam was paid a visit by Gromyko, not Primakov. Leave Iran starting in January, he was told by the Soviet foreign minister, while at the same time his military chiefs told him that outside Iraqi occupation areas there was the movement of Soviet troops elsewhere in Iran into what looked like attack positions. Saddam would have liked to have stood firm. He plotted and planned. The Iranians under Iraqi control could vote to become part of Iraq. He could work with other countries – but who? – to check Soviet pressure. He could offer the Soviets military bases. He could… There was nothing that would work though. Saddam couldn’t see anyway short of fighting the Soviet Union where he could keep what he had in Iran. There was no solution to be found. He gave in, bitterly and swearing revenge, but still folded in the face of the realisation that this wasn’t a fight which he could win. Iraqi forces would start leaving Iran in January. Before then though, anything left of value which had already not been removed from Iran would be taken now.


Elsewhere in the world, the reaction from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait continued. Oil prices had stabilised somewhat though still remained higher than they had been beforehand. There were armies in the desert and more on their way there. A huge military stand-off was occurring and the threat of a bigger war was still there. Worries were present that Iraq was soon to go to war with the Saudis and the Gulf Arab Monarchies – diplomatic tensions with Iran and the Soviets were not known publicly – in the end. Those countries had their troops in the Saudi desert and then there was the movement of Egyptian troops across the Red Sea and into Saudi Arabia too. It was a defensive measure, the world was told, as one Arab nation helped out another. Questions were asked by outsiders over the attitude of Israel to this. What did they think of the Egyptian Army moving like this? From Tel Aviv, there came only silence. Israel had nothing to say in public about this matter, nothing at all in fact. It was clear that they did have an opinion but it wasn’t one which they wished to share with the rest of the world. That opinion was that they were happy to see it. Saddam was just as much a threat to Israel as he was to his Arab neighbours. If they wanted to work together to oppose him, Israel wasn’t about to object. Pakistan’s ruling generals also gave their nod of approval to that Egyptian move plus the Gulf Arab Monarchies working with the Saudis too. Pakistani officially-sanctioned mercenaries were soon numbering in the (low) thousands within the army of the United Arab Emirates, an army which was up near the Kuwaiti border. The Arabs and their friends in Pakistan were all working together to defend Saudi Arabia because the belief among them was that Saddam would be sending his tanks southwards. He wasn’t yet they didn’t know that.

The oil crisis over the summer had brought those market reactions yet also political developments. The Americans – who hadn’t been buying neither Iraqi nor Kuwaiti oil – started to look at a deal with Mexico alongside further expansion of domestic sources. The Mexican oil industry was booming and there was growth to be had at home too. Kennedy was more welcoming to such a future for American energy needs rather than seeing domestic economic problems brought about by such issues as one Arab dictatorship threatening to fight another (his view on the Saudis had hardened due to their ongoing diplomatic behaviour and how their lobbyists had worked with his opponents in Congress) therefore hurting American consumers. France and Italy bought some Soviet oil when they cut off Iraq though were also looking elsewhere in the world, to non-OPEC nations especially for France which had no wish to be beholden to such a dysfunctional organisation. Britain and Norway started to plan for further expansion of production of North Sea oil. The West Germans government, led by an embattled Chancellor Schmidt, speculated about further nuclear power enhancements at home; that was the same across in Japan too. The 1981 Oil Crisis, followed on the back of those in ’73 then ’79, was changing thinking across the West. Maybe there might not be concrete results in the end, but oil from the Middle East had once again shown how unreliable and troublesome it was. There had to be something better than that.