[InitialLastName]

Not to engage the broader question of whether socialism has any success stories, but I think one could more sympathetically read GP's "successful socialist country" in this context as "a country successfully converted to idealogical alignment with the Soviet Union"

[Loq]

That would be misleading, since it would distract attention away from the core reasons of such conflicts.

Aside, during the cold war, many leaders in developing countries played the US and the Soviet union off against each other, in order to get weapons etc. Erdogan in Turkey has been masterfully doing some variation of this for a while.