Russia Rising

Putin's Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu, Stanislav Secrieru, Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu, Stanislav Secrieru

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755636655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política rusa

The war in Syria has put Russia at the centre of Middle Eastern politics. Moscow's return to the region following a prolonged period of absence has enhanced its geopolitical status at a time it has emerged as a rival to the West. Yet, contrary to the media hype, Vladimir Putin is not set to become the new power-broker in this strategically important part of the world.
Co-authored by a team of prominent scholars and analysts from the EU, US, Russia and the Middle East, this book explores Russia's role in the Middle East and North Africa, the diverse drivers shaping its policy, and the response from local players. Chapters map out the history of Russian involvement, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impact on key issues such as security and defence, regional conflicts, arms trade, and energy, as well as relations influential states and country clusters such as Iran, the Gulf, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and the Maghreb. It also looks at how the Middle East impacts on Russia's relations with the West. The book offers a balanced assessment of Russian influence, highlighting both the political, diplomatic and commercial gains made thanks to Putin's decision in September 2015 to intervene militarily in Syria and the constraints preventing Moscow from replacing the United States as a regional hegemon.

1

Introduction

Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu, and Stanislav Secrieru

In 1984, the US Department of Defense ran its annual assessment of Soviet power in the Middle East and, more generally, the Third World. The report fretted about the inexorable rise of Moscow’s influence.

The USSR has greatly increased its offensive military capability and has significantly enhanced its ability to conduct military operations worldwide … Since invading Afghanistan 4 years ago, the USSR has established bases within striking distance of the Persian Gulf oil fields. The Soviets continue to deliver a growing arsenal of weapons to Syria, Libya, Cuba and Nicaragua. The number of Soviet personnel in Syria has grown from 2,000 to 7,000 … The USSR has increased its influence in the Third World through the presence of over 21,000 military advisers and technicians in nearly 30 countries. An additional 120,000 Soviet troops are stationed in Afghanistan, Cuba and Syria. The result is that the Soviets are able to cultivate pro-Soviet sentiments and influence local military policies.¹

At the time, such a doom-and-gloom perspective appeared warranted. The same year, the United States, France, and Italy were forced to withdraw troops from Lebanon after Hezbollah militants bombed their barracks with help from Syria and Iran. USSR, having been dislodged from Egypt, was cementing ties with Hafez al-Assad, while sending military aid to Iraq in its war against Iran, an ally of Syria.² Meanwhile, relations between America and its allies across the Atlantic were going downhill. The United States threatened sanctions over a Soviet natural gas pipeline built with discounted credits from Western European banks.

Soon enough, it would transpire that fears of resurgent Soviet influence were overblown. Moscow’s capacity to project and sustain power overseas turned out to be rather narrow. Instead of focusing on costly geopolitical expansion, the leadership in Moscow shifted attention to domestic consolidation and reform. The USSR withdrew from Afghanistan, cut out aid to its clients in the Middle East, and ultimately imploded as forces unleashed by perestroika and glasnost swept through the country. The so-called unipolar moment ensued. For two decades, US hegemony shaped the region’s politics.

Current debates on Russia’s growing role in the Middle East echo the early 1980s.³ For the past several years, Russia and Vladimir Putin have ruled the headlines. Military intervention in Syria, without precedent in the post-Soviet period, elevated Russia to a power broker in the war-torn country, once a regional power, and in the Middle East. Moscow has rebuilt links to former friends and found new partners. It benefits from strong ties to top-tier regional players such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Egypt, the largest Arab state, has stepped up military and economic cooperation with the Russians as well. Russia has inserted itself in regional flashpoints such as Libya and even in Yemen. At the same time, Moscow has managed to keep at an arm’s length from local rivalries. It is in the unique position of being on good terms with both the Israelis and the Iranians, Turkey and the Kurds, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Libya’s government of national unity and its adversary, General Khalifa Haftar, Algeria and Morocco, and so forth. In consequence, Russia has been reaping strategic and commercial benefits: Russian arms exports are up; state-owned energy firms like Rosneft and Gazprom are on the lookout for lucrative deals; Turkey’s purchase of S-400 missiles is fracturing its relationship with the United States—to the Kremlin’s advantage; Riyadh and Moscow manage in tandem, not without hiccups, global oil prices.

Russia’s spectacular return to the Middle East raises lots of questions. What is behind Moscow’s renewed interest in the Middle East and North Africa? How sustainable is the “comeback”—and are we not bearing witness to another short-lived surge as in the late Cold War? Is Russia to remain an arbiter in regional affairs, or will it eventually decide to pull back? Can it avoid becoming bogged down in local squabbles? How is the foray into the Middle East affecting relations with the United States, still the leading global power, at present as well as in the future? What are the consequences of Russian activism for local players and how does it impact the balance at the regional level? In order to address these issues, Russia Rising: Putin’s Policy in the Middle East and North Africa provides a snapshot of the Russian involvement in the region, maps the drivers and political dynamics at work, and explores future trajectories. The initial impulse for this volume came from a Chaillot paper on Russia’s surge in the Middle East published by the European Union Institute for Security Studies (Paris) in 2018.⁴ While based on this paper, the book significantly widens and deepens the research scope.

Russia’s Return: The Backstory

Many analysts took note of Russia only with the onset of the Arab Spring, or even the intervention in Syria. In reality, the so-called return to the Middle East had been in the making for a decade or more. In the late 1990s, Foreign Minister (and later Prime Minister) Yevgeny Primakov, an Arabist by training, argued for an alliance with Iran and Iraq to balance against US unilateralism.⁵ Russia deepened economic ties with Turkey, a key ally of America. In 1997, Ankara and Moscow agreed to lay the first gas pipeline across the Black Sea. Links with Israel grew closer, too, as around 1.6 million Russophone Jews from across the former Soviet Union immigrated, leaving their mark on Israeli society and politics. Throughout the 2000s, the Russian Federation doubled down on the Middle East. President Putin was the first Russian leader to officially visit the Jewish state in 2005. Moscow also began to build bridges and set diplomatic and intelligence back channels to the Gulf, eager to curb support for Chechen insurgents. Vladimir Putin visited Saudi Arabia in February 2007, another first. Russia became an observer in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an acknowledgment of Islam as part of its cultural and historic heritage. The new Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who cultivated a pious Muslim image, became the face of Russian diplomacy in the Middle East.⁶ Russia cleaned up books converting Soviet-era debts into new arms deals and investment ventures. In 2005 Russia agreed to write off 73 percent of Syria’s dues, estimated at $9.8 billion, in exchange for new arms contracts and access to the facility at Tartus once used by the Soviet navy.⁷ Moscow pushed for institutionalization of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum headquartered in Doha and sought to redress relations with wealthy oil producers from the Gulf. Freed from the constraints of ideology, post-Soviet Russia focused on strategic and economic gains, reviving old contacts and forging new partnerships across the Middle East and North Africa.

Engagement provided Russia with a hedge against the United States. The opening toward the region coincided with a downturn in relations with Washington during Putin’s second term as president (2004–8). The initial enthusiasm in the Kremlin with regard to the post-9/11 “war on terror” gave way to opposition to US unilateralism. This was not only a response to the “colored revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine that Moscow blamed on Western meddling. Having backed the US campaign in Afghanistan, Putin deplored the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. To him, it fractured regional order and posed a grave threat to stability in the Middle East and beyond, an argument that was to resurface during the Arab Spring some years later. In his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin observed:

And let’s say things as they are—one hand distributes charitable help and the other hand not only preserves economic backwardness but also reaps the profits thereof. The increasing social tension in depressed regions inevitably results in the growth of radicalism, extremism, feeds terrorism and local conflicts. And if all this happens in, shall we say, a region such as the Middle East where there is increasingly the sense that the world at large is unfair, then there is the risk of global destabilization.⁸

On the one hand, Russia portrayed itself as a champion of the status quo, adamantly opposed to regime change. On the other, Putin deployed Soviet-era rhetoric portraying Western neocolonialism as the source of social and political ills bedeviling the Middle East. However, by holding the West responsible, the Russian leadership overlooked the ferment brewing within local societies, which eventually led to the upheaval in the early 2010s.

Yet, as in the Cold War, tough talk did not rule out cooperation with the United States on issues of common interest. Russians made inroads in post-Saddam Iraq, agreeing to write off debts as early as 2004. Moscow did not block at the UN the establishment of a special tribunal to try suspects of the 2005 assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri linked to the Syrian government.⁹ Starting from 2006, Russia supported UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to halt its nuclear program and, in June 2010, it voted in favor of Resolution 1929 introducing sanctions against the Islamic Republic. It furthermore froze the delivery of S-300 missiles to Tehran. Cooperation on the Iranian nuclear file marked the peak of the policy of reset (perezagruzka) pursued by President Dmitry Medvedev and the Obama administration.¹⁰ Ultimately, Russia became one of the signatories of the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by Iran and the West. Back then as now, Russia looked at the Middle East as a source of geopolitical currency to be used in dealings with America.

The Arab Spring ushered in a new chapter. Russia was no longer an outsider in the Middle East, with economic and security links to countries such as Libya and Syria. But it was certainly seen in such light by the United States and the Europeans, as they struggled to craft a response to the popular upheaval across the region. The Russian leadership, in turn, interpreted the Arab Spring as an extension of the Bush-era doctrine of regime change. Libya proved to be the inflection point. In March 2011, then prime minister Vladimir Putin upbraided President Medvedev for bandwagoning with the West over the imposition of a no-fly zone and indirectly endorsing the intervention by Britain and France, with the United States “leading from behind.” “The [UN Security Council] resolution is defective,” Putin told workers at a defense plant in the Russian provincial town of Votkinsk. “It resembles medieval calls for crusades.”¹¹

The sense that Russia had been tricked over Libya informed its dogged defense of the Assad regime in Syria. Moscow vetoed all attempts of the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo. Russia sent to the regime military hardware, including twenty-four MiG-29 fighter planes. Between 2011 and 2013, Russian deliveries accounted for 85 percent of all arms sales to Damascus.¹² At the same time, Russia kept diplomatic channels open and options on the table, taking part in the Geneva talks on Syria and, in 2012, supporting political transition.¹³ Putin scored a diplomatic coup in August 2013, taking advantage of President Obama’s reluctance to enforce his red lines in reaction to the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. The Russian president mediated a deal under which Assad agreed to give up his chemical arsenal and accede to the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention. Moscow positioned itself as a power broker, a foretaste of what was to come.

Russian Policy Deciphered

Russia’s involvement in the Middle East reflects a variety of factors at the international, regional, and domestic levels.

First, Russia pursues status. As the chapter by Dmitri Trenin reminds us, recognition as an indispensable power with a stake in issues of global concern has always been at the forefront of Russian foreign policy. Influencing a key region, just like the Soviet Union in its day, signals Russia is back in the game—and is capable, with limited investment, to mount a challenge to US dominance. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea, President Obama dismissed Russia as a regional power bound to decline.¹⁴ While his assessment might not be entirely off the mark, the intervention in Syria and Russia’s subsequent diplomatic activism across the Middle East testify to its ability to project power and influence beyond the post-Soviet region. In addition, Russia has gained clout thanks to its partnership with Iran and Turkey, two pi...