Putin’s long game may come back to haunt him
BRILLIANT tactics, lousy strategy. As the likelihood rises that an Islamist bomb killed 224 people on the Russian Metrojet plane, that would seem a suitable epitaph for Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria – and indeed for his 16-year rule over Russia, in which the storyline has mattered far more than the facts.
Foreign policy is soap opera in Russia, with cardboard villains and a bombastic, sentimental storyline of heroism and victimisation. The first season was set in the mud of Ukraine, featuring villainous Nazi-loving Ukrainians and brave Russians carrying the anti-fascist banners of their Soviet forebears.
That has now given way to a new drama set against the exotic backdrop of the Syrian civil war. Here the enemy is villainous Islamists – foes not only of Russia but of modern civilisation. Where the West dithers, Russia acts. The Kremlin’s propaganda channels feted the air strikes against Syrian rebels as a sign that the country was once again a geopolitical force to be reckoned with.
But the reckoning may be a bloody one. Russia is now firmly (and probably irrevocably) positioned as an enemy of conservative and radical Sunni Muslims. It is an ardent supporter of the Sisi regime in Egypt, which jails, tortures and executes members of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it is using air strikes and ground troops to support the Assad regime, nominally against Isil, but in fact mostly against an array of other rebel forces.
This represents a radical and dangerous shift from the Kremlin’s past policy. The Soviet Union pursued a policy of intimidating non-entanglement in the Middle East. In 1985, gunmen from the Lebanese-Hezbollah militia kidnapped four Soviet embassy staff in Beirut, killing one of them. The KGB responded by seizing a close relative of a Hizbollah leader, castrating him, and sending his body parts, and then his corpse, to his kinsman. The three survivors were released, and no Soviet or Russian officials have been targeted by Middle Eastern terrorists since. After 1991 Russia aimed to secure influence rather than project power. It befriended Israel and opened ties with Saudi Arabia. It had good relations with secular dictators like Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, sold weapons to Shia in Iran, and played a background role in the Israel-Palestine peace process.
Mr Putin’s spectacular involvement in Syria upended that. It was brilliant showmanship – but it has left Russia without a strategy. The enmity it has aroused will be long-lasting, while the gains are evanescent. The likelihood of restoring the Assad regime in control over a united Syria is minimal.
Yet short-term success and longterm failure are the hallmark of Mr Putin’s rule. He scores stunning coups – against the oligarchs, against the opposition, against neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine, in energy deals with China and Germany – yet at the end Russia languishes.
Its economy remains unmodernised and dangerously dependent on natural resources, its institutions are weak, public services dire, the population shrinking, infrastructure crumbling, the economy shrinking, corruption rampant: no wonder Russians (notably the families of the people who run the country) are so keen to live abroad.
Russia is now a pariah in the civilised world. Even the most deluded and naive outsiders – such as foreign policy experts in the United States and Europe – now admit that the Kremlin is a threat. The front-line states of Europe are raising their military spending. Nato has accepted that territorial defence of its members is again its main task. The West has imposed sanctions whose long-term effect on the Russian economy will be devastating.
Yet none of this bothers Mr Putin. In his view, if you keep winning in the short term, the long term can look after itself. The clichéd portrayal of Russians is as natural chess players. But Mr Putin’s sport is judo, and his formative years were in the KGB, which ran the Soviet Union on a mixture of lies and fear.
From a Western viewpoint, one might imagine that the Kremlin now risks a storm of protest from Russians scared and angry that the regime’s military adventurism has made them terrorist targets. But the chances of that are slim. Russians know protests are futile. And they have become used to terrorist attacks – including those carried out by Chechens, the victims of Mr Putin’s first soap-opera war, which crushed the breakaway republic’s independence movement.
Instead the Kremlin propaganda machine will spin the tragedy over Sinai as vindication for its tough line in Syria. That it is deploying air-defence missiles there against an adversary with no aircraft is beside the point: on television the pictures matter so much more than the plot.