Putin’s crusade in the Holy Land
When Russia launched a military intervention to support Syrian dictator Bashar Assad last year, U.S. President Barack Obama responded with wishful schadenfreude.
Russia, he predicted, would get “stuck in a quagmire.” He added: “It won’t work.”
Obama had good reason to resent Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to imagine it might backfire on its architect, President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. president clearly hoped an overstretched Russia would get its fingers burned in Syria and emerge chastened from its adventure in Middle East counter-insurgency.
That’s not what happened. Russia didn’t get stuck in a Syrian quagmire. It applied a limited amount of military force to great effect, reversing the tide of the civil war and ensuring Assad will not go unless Putin agrees. From Moscow’s perspective, the Kremlin’s intervention worked out just fine.
This month, despite Obama’s earlier scoffing, the United States and Russia announced they had brokered a plan to bring about a ceasefire in Syria.
The deal said that if a truce held, Moscow and Washington would begin joint military operations against ISIL and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaida’s one-time affiliate in Syria, previously known as al-Nusra Front. The latter group’s forces are intermingled on the front lines with other rebel groups, including some backed by the United States.
By Monday, the agreement was in disarray. Two days later, with airstrikes being reported from Aleppo in northern Syria, Russia and the U.S. were openly blaming one another. Whether the deal is salvaged or not, it’s already accomplished much for Russia — and for Moscow’s ally, Assad.
If the deal does hold, large chunks of the armed opposition will be neutralized, and Assad’s jihadist foes, ISIL and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, will face the combined military power of Russia and the United States.
The deal militarily restricts Assad as well. To the extent that it puts a stop to the barrel bombs and chlorine gas his forces have been dropping on Syrian neighbourhoods, there may be some benefit to Syrian civilians. But the biggest winner by far is Russia. Regardless of what happens next regarding a ceasefire, Putin has manoeuvred the U.S. into agreeing to join Russia’s supposed quagmire. Obama looks weak, a U.S. president forced to respond to Russia’s moves in the Middle East, and Putin has solidified his status as an indispensable arbitrator of Syria’s fate.
The Russian leader’s intervention in Syria is part of a larger goal of forging a bigger role for his country in the Middle East.
He’s also nurtured ties with Iran, smoothed over previously fraught relations with Turkey and offered to host peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
RUSSIA NOW PRESENTS ITSELF ... AS A PRESERVER OF THE STATUS QUO.
Russia is succeeding in part because the U.S. is letting it. Obama has long wanted to disentangle his country from the Middle East, and Moscow is exploiting the empty space. Russia is there, says a diplomat from the region, because the U.S. isn’t.
But Putin’s interventions are also driven by concerns much closer to home.
The collapse of the Soviet Union shook the Russian president to the core, perhaps because, for him, it was so unexpected. He’s also seen what he regards as the next greatest threat to Russian strength coming for years.
Between 2000 and 2014, uprisings and revolutions unseated dictators and autocratic governments — often ones friendly to Russia — in at least half a dozen countries. The most worrying for Putin were the ones closest, politically and geographically, to Moscow: Serbia, Georgia and, above all, Ukraine. The Russian leader responded to an uprising in Ukraine by invading and annexing Crimea. He also sent Russian troops into eastern Ukraine, where a low-level conflict still burns.
When Putin looks at the Middle East, he sees two problems that threaten Russian interests.
The first stems from the breakdown of order in the region and what he believes is the rise of radical Islam.
“The initial perception in Moscow is that we were making a complete mess of the Middle East, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, and then the invasion of Libya, and our giving (Egyptian president Hosni) Mubarak a push,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“In the Russian reading of all this, the end result of American action is always to exacerbate the chaos and to empower radical jihadist forces who are hostile to Russian interests as well as to American interests.”
That in itself might have persuaded Putin to bolster Assad militarily. He believes the Syrian president functions as a check on Islamist extremism.
But the second problem Putin sees is a pattern of regime change he fears could spread. He wants to discredit that process and undermine civil society groups that might want to topple authoritarian governments elsewhere.
“Russia now presents itself to the rest of the world as a preserver of the status quo and a supporter of existing regimes,” says Angela Stent, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University.
Moscow’s military intervention in support of Assad is about “wanting to ensure that you don’t have more Arab Spring-type movements in the Middle East, and then that they don’t come home.”
That explains why Putin is determined to keep Assad, or someone like him, in power. Why he has been so keen to partner with the U.S. is a little more complicated.
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, it has faced international isolation and Western sanctions. At the 2014 Group of 20 summit in Australia, recalls Stent, Putin was even shunned socially.
The situation in Ukraine has not improved, says Stent, but how Western leaders treat Putin has.
“Because of what Russia is doing in Syria, primarily, he gets all these meetings, and people see Russia as a major player. (Putin is) using that leverage to force the West to go back to dealing with Russia,” she says.
But the fact remains the U.S. has been made to deal with Russia as an equal in a part of the world where Washington once dominated. That’s a victory for Moscow.
The contents of the deal make it an even bigger Russian victory. It’s worth recalling that soon after the uprising against Assad began in 2011, Obama said “the time has come” for the Syrian leader to step down.
He then declared a “red line” over the Assad’s regime’s use of chemical weapons. Assad’s forces later gassed hundreds to death, including children. Obama did nothing other than acquiesce to a Russian-brokered deal that saw Assad give up its most dangerous chemical weapons while continuing to attack and kill civilians by other means.
Yet despite such history, Washington has struck a deal to form a military alliance in Syria with Russia that will strengthen Assad. This reflects a shift in White House thinking about the desirability of ousting him.
“We ended up tying ourselves in knots in Syria. We committed ourselves unambiguously at first to the prospect that Assad had to step down, but we didn’t provide the force that would require him to do that,” says Mankoff. “So our initial policy was pretty much a failure.
“As the conflict has dragged on and our options have looked less and less palatable, we’ve begun accommodating ourselves to the Russian view.”
BECAUSE OF WHAT RUSSIA IS DOING IN SYRIA, PRIMARILY, HE GETS ALL THESE MEETINGS, AND PEOPLE SEE RUSSIA AS A MAJOR PLAYER.
— ANGELA STENT, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY