List of countries which happily participated in USA's invasion of Iraq wants to say hello!
The American way works the other way around, they usually are for free market until you sell its enemies weapons or help finance the war.
They also do questionable things but IMHO it's a much better deal overall.
And not without its own drawbacks, as discussed elsewhere.
The Soviet one that you have drawn in your head is predatory. In real life, USSR went into Afghanistan alone as far as I know. Bulgaria meanwhile could dedicate efforts towards making PCs.
In the USA-satellite open market situation, Bulgaria gets to send cheap workers to fill positions in the EU as well as offers for its brightest minds, treated as a flyover country. No PCs.
The voting situation WRT Warsaw pact and Comecon was likely the same. Bulgaria can't vote anything useful in either ones.
There's no an governmental institution in Bulgaria that collects Bulgarians from the streets and sending them to other countries to work work cheap, like they do with doctors in Cuba or workers in DPRK.
You find a job, get a plane ticket, go there and work, get paid like everyone else. That doesn't make you a cheap Bulgarian labor. They like to call it like that because the talent pool increases and they want to imagine that employers are hiring Bulgarian butchers that can't cut meat or Bulgarian developers that can't code just because its cheap. That's not the case, it's a free market.
Which is almost always, as almost all EU countries have better conditions than Bulgaria. So in general you can assume a position with significantly worse social status than you had in Bulgaria, but if that position is in Germany, that is a net social benefit for you. So that's what you often do.
Bulgarian butchers in Germany, obviously, do not have native German to communicate with customers, and their butcher skills may be tailored to a different meat culture, so they are hired because Germany have more butcher positions than Germans want to occupy, and that German butchers will usually take the ones which pay more. Same for Bulgarian software developer in France: They have decent coding skills and English, but their French is no good, so they will be kept in more back-office roles, whereas French developers from France will be more customer-facing and paid somewhat more for this skill. That's pretty basic migration economy 101.
In Comecon, Bulgaria was one of more developed regions, which then got to host more prestigious industries.
If that was a valid way to reduce a discussion, I'd had it wrapped up five comments ago.
IMHO the ideological markets are very dangerous, gives you the wrong feedback on your output and makes you completely reliant.
USSR pumps oil, digs minerals and uses the income from that to purchase stuff from Bulgaria not because Bulgaria is the best(it might have been the best or very good at one point) but because politics. Then Bulgaria doesn't have proper feedback and instead of investing to advance its computer business keeps doing the same when the west with their real markets leaps ahead. Then one day the only customer who bought Bulgarian stuff for ideological reasons is gone and Bulgaria finds out that they don't have any customers anymore because they didn't invest in advancing their tech because they didn't need to.
Unfortunately, the west today has a similar problem of ideology based markets but its nowhere nearly as bad as the situation in Communist Bulgaria.
One argument might be, if the system worked why wouldn't keep doing it? Because its again very dangerous. If the USSR survived and Bulgaria was kept being the tech powerhouse of USSR with a few nodes behind the state of the art, Bulgaria might have been compelled to send the troops for the invasions USSR might have started because that's how empires work(Bulgarian economy collapsing the moment Russia decides not buying from Bulgaria since it disobeys). Notice that the Russian soldiers in Ukraine come from far eastern regions of the Russian federation, that would have been the fate of Bulgaria today.