Russia in the Middle East

Michael Totten writes at World Affairs Journal,

America is tired of being America, so Russia is being Russia again.

...The telegram to President Obama has arrived: “The Iranian-Syria-Hezbollah axis—by far the world’s most powerful terrorist nexus and the bane of American servicemen and policymakers for more than three decades—is now officially the Russian-Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis. Details to follow.”

Syria became a Russian client state in 1966 when the Arab Socialist Baath Party seized power in a coup d’état, overthrowing the relatively moderate Aflaqites and establishing a far more brutal regime influenced heavily by Marxism-Leninism.

The relationship atrophied, of course, after the Soviet Union collapsed. For a long time, Moscow could barely hold its own country together, and Syria found its international support from the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist army in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

But Russia is back on its feet again, Assad needs some help, and four and a half years into the Syrian civil war, it’s obvious that the United States is largely uninterested in any serious attempt to resolve the conflict one way or another. Russia can do whatever it wants.

...According to at least one American defense official, as of September 14th—two weeks before the intervention officially began—Russia’s deployment was already the largest since the Soviet days. In late September, Moscow began launching airstrikes against the smorgasbord of Syrian rebels fighting the government in and around the cities of Homs and Hama, well outside territory held by ISIS, supposedly the target of the intervention. And by early October, Russia was launching cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea and coordinating its attacks with Hezbollah.

Putin offered the prospect of a coalition against terror. But while the US and Russia agreed to a memorandum of understanding to avoid accidentally shooting each other out of the skies over Syria, Washington and Moscow otherwise aren’t cooperating.

...The US is right to oppose both ISIS and the Assad regime. Syria’s government has sponsored terrorism not only against every single one of its neighbors, but also against the United States in Iraq. But let’s be honest: There will be no nonviolent political transition in Syria. The regime is overwhelmingly dominated by members of the non-Muslim Alawite minority, who will never negotiate with jihadists who want to impale them as infidels, nor with the ragtag “democratic forces” (now largely driven by Kurdish fighters) theoretically backed by the US.

A proper transition to an inclusive and even quasi-civilized government in Damascus would first require the destruction of both the regime and the extremists, and right now no one is making any attempt to bring that about.

Fighting an insurgency with airstrikes, artillery, and cruise missiles is for losers. The US has been pinpricking ISIS from the skies for more than a year now with little to show for it. The Israelis thought they could beat Hezbollah from the air in 2006 and failed even more spectacularly.

Want to fight an effective counterinsurgency? Call General David Petraeus. He pulled it off smashingly in Iraq, but it required billions upon billions of dollars, tens of thousands of ground troops, substantial support from the local population, and years of determined effort and battlefield casualties.

And his gains evaporated almost instantly after he and his fellow soldiers went home.

Vladimir Putin is not going to call David Petraeus. At least for now, he’s only interested in a low-risk, low-budget intervention. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly and the Moscow Times newspaper, Russia’s Syrian campaign is costing $4 million a day. That’s just $1.5 billion a year. Which sounds like a lot until you consider that the United States spent roughly $1.4 trillion in Iraq—a thousand times as much.

Will Russia be able to pacify an entire country while spending just a fraction of a percent as much as the US spent to pacify Iraq only temporarily? Probably not.

But no matter. Putin has three goals in Syria, and none of them involve permanent pacification.

First and most immediately he wants to prop up Russia’s sole ally in the Arab world.

The second goal is announcing that he wants America’s job as the world’s superpower now that we’re sick of it.

Putin wants America’s job because, why not? Russia is not Belgium, and it is not Canada. It was one of only two superpowers until the Soviet Union imploded under the weight of its own belligerent imbecility, and it has been wallowing in a post-imperial funk—“malaise” in Jimmy Carter’s lexicon—ever since.

...His third reason for intervening in Syria is because it’s good for him personally. During the Communist era, many Russians took pride in the fact that their nation was powerful even though it was poor. Putin can’t raise Russian living standards to Western levels, but he can revive some of the motherland’s former glory, and he can do it without the slave labor camps. The man is no Joseph Stalin. Secretary of State John Kerry was right to compare Putin to a 19th-century czar born two centuries late. His ratings are far better than those of any Romanov: Shortly before Halloween, less than a month into his Syrian bombing campaign, Putin’s approval ratings in Russia exceeded 90 percent.

...A weak nation couldn’t even consider doing what he’s doing. Only strong nations can project hard power beyond their own borders. Belgium can’t do it. Canada and Mexico can’t do it. None of the Arab states can do it.

...The administration has had trouble with Russia right from the start, beginning with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much lampooned “reset” with Moscow, which seemed to treat Putin’s intransigence as a hangover from the Bush administration.

The “reset” obviously failed. Badly. Putin is who he is. George W. Bush didn’t make him that way. The Soviet Union and the KGB made him that way. Any viable “reset” would have to come from the Russian side. The idea that Putin would play well with others if we simply acted nice and smiley was as delusional as calling Assad a reformer.

...Yes, the Cold War is over, and yes, Putin is spectacularly unlikely to ever attack the American homeland or any of America’s allies in NATO or elsewhere. But it’s obvious—isn’t it?—that Russia is brazenly expanding its role in the world, and that it’s doing so at America’s expense.

...Let’s go back to George Kennan, who said famously that “Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.”

There’s a reason for that, and it’s deeply embedded in Russia’s history and geography.

Look at a map. Russia is an enormous, sprawling monstrosity of a nation even without its former Soviet satellites. It spans 11 times zones—nearly halfway around the planet—and overwhelms almost all of Eurasia.

...After Russians threw off the Asian yoke, they knew they had to expand their territory as far as possible from the population core in Eastern Europe if they were to survive. So Russia expanded, all the way to the other side of the world—not just 11 time zones, but 12. (Let’s not forget that even Alaska once belonged to Moscow.)

Rather than even considering membership in the European Union—Russia would view it as a sort of surrender—Putin is forging his Eurasian Economic Union instead. It so far consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia.

The European Union is somewhat decentralized. Germany and France have a lot of influence in decisionmaking, but no single nation dictates to everyone else. The Eurasian Economic Union, though, has Moscow in the cockpit with everyone else as junior partners or, as Kennan would have put it, vassals.

There’s no better way to win favor in Tehran than by co-sponsoring Iran’s own Middle Eastern proxies, Assad and Hezbollah. And there’s no better way to keep the West from breathing up his pant legs in the Middle East than by making himself the new power broker in a region long influenced by the United States, which he clearly sees as his biggest geopolitical foe.

“Russia wants to get rid of ISIS,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on the campaign trail. “We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let ’em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?”

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the general truth that Russian expansionism has been almost entirely deleterious for everybody but Russians. Vladimir Putin isn’t interested in getting rid of ISIS. At least not initially.

...Either way, freezing Syria’s status quo may be the best Russia can get. If it’s willing to send in massive numbers of ground troops, sure it could destroy the ISIS “state” in the east, but how long would that last? The United States defeated ISIS under its previous name, al-Qaeda in Iraq, only to watch it mushroom again as soon as American soldiers were out of the way.

Predicting the course of events is a difficult science generally, and especially difficult in a byzantine place like the Middle East. Lord only knows where Russia’s adventure will lead, especially if it lasts several years. Keenly perceptive analysts can sometimes see around one corner, but nobody can see around four.

Obama may be right that Putin is getting himself into a quagmire that he will sorely regret, but it partly depends on Putin’s goals. If he simply wants to shore up Assad and doesn’t care what ISIS does on its own turf in the hinterlands, his odds of success are excellent.

One thing at least is certain: Getting Russia out of the Middle East again will take a long time.

Read more here.