I just saw a video about the Nigerian civil war and I started wondering about this. What do we do if a country is trying to support a side and not tell the world. On top of that, if the country does not tell the world will it come out in time or will we just never know?
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Supporting a war effort isn’t the kind of thing you can keep secret. Thousands of public sector workers would be involved. You can’t allocate government resources to a foreign war without people noticing. It’s too big not to notice.
You can apply this common sense to a lot of other subjects too, especially conspiracy theories. Take the flat-earthers for instance, their belief hinges on the fact that the supposed secret of the Earth’s shape has been kept tightly for thousands of years despite requiring the complicity of every physicist, every nation, every satellite TV provider, and every airline on Earth. Obviously that’s ridiculous and if such a secret existed it’d be impossible to hide at such a scale. The same thing applies to your question, war support involves too many people and too many resources to ever be completely 100% hidden.
Depends if some other country or organization can dig up proof about that country’s involvement and wants to publicize it internationally.
And in the case of a country doing that, it would also potentially draw scrutiny of that country’s own involvement in other conflicts and issues.
It does happen though, typically through international organizations like the UN etc.
Short, ELI5 answer: Spies.
For agencies like the CIA and NSA in the U.S. or MI6 in the UK, this is basically what they do all day: find out what other countries are up to. It can be as exciting as bribing a foreign official to covertly send you highly classified information or as boring as reading the local newspaper and seeing what it says. You might get the information directly, or you might have to piece it together from clues. Either way, the international intelligence community generally doesn’t like surprises, and therefore throws a ton of resources into knowing what everyone else is up to all of the time.
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