While most scholars agree that Russian foreign policy has been disproportionately focused on the West since the end of the Cold War,² there are two main positions with regard to how much the Kremlin’s strategic priorities have changed in the post-Cold War period. The most widespread view is that, after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian leadership aimed to rejoin the international community, in the hope that partnering with the United States and the European Union would help Russia achieve both security and prosperity. This attitude began to gradually change from the late 1990s with the more assertive, and eventually anti-Western, foreign policy adopted by the successive administrations of President Vladimir Putin.³ There are diverging views on the reasons for this change: some blame it on the decision by Washington and its allies to ignore Russia’s concerns about the enlargement of NATO and the West-dominated security order in general.⁴ Others argue that Russia’s apprehensions were ill-conceived, and that ultimately it was Moscow that missed the chance to integrate into the liberal international order.⁵

Another position, most recently spelled out by Dmitry Gorenburg, holds that Russia’s strategic priorities have never changed: ever since the Soviet collapse, the country has sought “to restore Russia’s great power status while maintaining a zone of influence in states on Russia’s border as a buffer against potential security threats.”⁶ Here, the observed variation in foreign policy was not due to a change in priorities, but to the fact that during Putin’s presidency Russia has been able to partially catch up with the West in terms of military power, economic well-being, and global influence. An even more radical version of this perspective is promoted by the pro-Western political elites in Eastern Europe, in particular in the Baltic states, where Russia is considered an expansionist empire that will always threaten its neighbors as long as it has enough power and resources to conduct independent foreign policy.

In this chapter, I do not directly intervene in the debate on the continuity and change in Russian foreign policy priorities, nor do I aim to provide a full overview of Moscow’s policies in the Middle East. Rather, what I seek to highlight is how specific interpretations of major trends and events in global politics have resulted in policy choices, and how the relational dynamic between Russia and the West solidified the approach to global affairs that came to drive Russia’s Middle East policy from around 2012–13 onwards.

Russia’s outlook continues to focus on the West, perceived as the main subject of world politics, and tends to underestimate local political dynamics, especially on the domestic level. It criticizes the idea of a unipolar world, allegedly promoted by the United States and its allies, and calls upon them to face up to the fact that the world has become multipolar.⁷ Paradoxically, Moscow does this from a perspective that still, in a somewhat outdated fashion, sees the world as bipolar, with Russia providing the main counterbalance to US influence.⁸ The role of China, BRICS, the G-20, and similar institutions is acknowledged but never brought to the fore.⁹ In a further twist of this logic, while criticizing US unilateralism, Russia uses it as a justification of its own selective disrespect for international norms and institutions, which is one of the enabling factors behind Moscow’s skillful use of its asymmetrical power vis-à-vis the United States and other Western actors. Last, but not least, Moscow’s foreign policy moves are to a large extent driven by domestic factors: any such move is an exercise of balancing between opposing political forces and elite groupings.¹⁰ This exercise has to be conducted with an eye towards the condition of the economy and the need to offset the costs of foreign policy action, both direct and indirect, by securing a favorable economic position now and in the future.¹¹

One might question the coherence of the Russian leadership’s policy choices in light of the individual criteria outlined above, or even go further and cast doubt on the assumptions on which those priorities are based. However, if one evaluates these decisions as integral elements of a global outlook, one has to admit that they do achieve a certain equilibrium between contradictory imperatives. It is clear that the decision to intervene in Syria, for example, was costly and did not bring any immediate economic benefits. Yet, the resulting increase in Russia’s geopolitical profile in the region as a whole is seen as a major investment in securing the country’s southern borders, as well as in future economic cooperation not just with Syria but also with Turkey, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.¹²

This perspective provides additional evidence in favor of the argument about continuity in Russian foreign policy since the early post-Cold War period. Indeed, most, if not all, elements of this approach were already present in Soviet policy during the 1990–91 crisis in the Persian Gulf.¹³ The decision to back the UN Security Council Resolution 678, authorizing the use of force against Iraq, was the outcome of a domestic political struggle between the old guard—most vocally represented by Evgeny Primakov, then a member of the Presidential Council under Gorbachev—and the proponents of New Thinking. The latter doctrine, proposed by Gorbachev and pushed forward by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, included such ideas as interdependence, universal human values, and the need to cooperate in addressing global challenges.¹⁴

Soviet support of the US position was never unequivocal: in the months between the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and the start of the US military campaign, Primakov spent a significant amount of time in Baghdad in an attempt to secure a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Already at that time, the scale of the US military deployment and of the campaign itself was seen as disproportional to the declared goal of restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty. Hence, it was aimed at securing long-term dominance in the region. The proponents of New Thinking, in their turn, were not driven by idealism alone: they viewed the Soviet policy of supporting radical anti-Western regimes in the Third World as unsustainable and ideologically bankrupt, and perceived cooperation with the West as the only way to overcome Russia’s political isolation and ensure its economic development.¹⁵

It is also interesting to note that even this lukewarm support for the US-led coalition paved the way towards improving Russia’s relations with Saudi Arabia.¹⁶ This, in turn, was the beginning of a new pattern regarding relations between Moscow and the states of the greater Middle East region, eventually producing a situation where Russia, unlike the United States, has reasonably good relations with almost all of them.¹⁷ Importantly, relations with Israel moved beyond the Cold War antagonism, although the radical improvement of economic and cultural relations did not eliminate a continuous diplomatic struggle.¹⁸ All of the above opened up new opportunities both in the field of diplomacy, especially conflict mediation,¹⁹ and the economy, such as the recent cooperation between Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, aimed at keeping global oil prices at a comfortable level.²⁰

This outcome, however, would have been hard to predict in the early 1990s, when the Russian Federation emerged as a sovereign state and the legal successor of the Soviet Union. Its foreign policy was firmly focused on Europe and the post-Soviet space, and for a while was shaped by the paradigm of New Thinking.²¹ This meant that the EU and the United States were considered Russia’s main partners, its source of financial aid and investment, and the strategic goal was to join the key institutions of the liberal world order, such as the Council of Europe and the World Trade Organization, established in 1994 on the basis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.²²

From the very beginning, however, this liberal foreign policy was challenged by a number of competing approaches. This chapter does not attempt yet another mapping of the foreign policy discourse,²³ but stresses that all these competing positions shared the idea of Russia having a special global and regional role. For the liberals, this role consisted in Russia being a great power alongside the United States, Germany, and Japan, while their rivals defined Russia’s mission as being in opposition to the West. The imperial tradition was probably the most powerful in this regard, to a large extent due to the fact that, regardless of the political preferences of individual decision-makers, they all had to deal with the imperial legacies inherited from the Soviet Union. This legacy materialized in a myriad of urgent policy issues, such as the withdrawal of the former Soviet army units from their distant outposts in Central Europe and elsewhere; Russia’s involvement in the armed conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and Tajikistan; the need to design a sensible citizenship policy and deal with migration; and the lack of certainty with regard to Russia’s own identity as a multiethnic rump of the former empire, torn apart by multiple separatist movements, most prominently in Chechnya and Tatarstan.²⁴

Another key aspect of the imperial legacy was the presence of external constituencies that appealed to Russia as the patron of the homeland, defined in ethnic and cultural terms, in opposition to the dividing lines that were solidifying as part of the new liberal world order.²⁵ The emergence of these clienteles was the result of a relational dynamic of social construction: the theme of “compatriots abroad” was played up by ethnic entrepreneurs both within Russia and in the new nationalizing states; in the situation of an identity crisis on both sides, the appeals of these entrepreneurs were likely to induce political mobilization and thus provide legitimacy to their claims. This dynamic was strongest in places like Transnistria and the Baltics, but it did influence the political process and bilateral relations in other areas as well, from Ukraine and Belarus to Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Kazakhstan.²⁶ The Balkans figure as a special case, but Serbian nationalist leaders were equally eager to play the Russian card.²⁷

What is important to emphasize here is that the imperial legacy, first and foremost the historical narratives of “brotherhood” deeply ingrained by Soviet education and mass culture, made it difficult for the decision-makers in Moscow to completely ignore such appeals for patronage. If they chose to do so, nationalists quickly occupied the niche, capitalizing on the preexisting public perceptions of moral responsibility vis-à-vis the “compatriots,” “the Serbian brothers,” and so on. Thus, the rather erratic course of Russian foreign policy through­out the 1990s was primarily determined by domestic political imperatives, with President Yeltsin, Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev, and other key policymakers having to maneuver between the liberals and the nationalists while also trying to manage the still-fragile market economy.

Understandably, foreign policy being an arena of vehement political struggles at home produced a certain myopia in Russia’s global outlook, which became mostly limited to its immediate surroundings, aside from managing its key relationship with the world’s only remaining superpower. With regard to the Middle East and other remote parts of the world, this basically meant withdrawal: the limited resources available to Russia had to be concentrated in high-priority areas, while the relational dynamic described above did not really work in the case of former clients in the Arab world and other culturally and geographically remote areas.

At the same time, it would be wrong to perceive Russian foreign policy of the 1990s as completely compartmentalized: on the contrary, the relational dynamic that drove Russia’s engagement in its “near abroad” also worked elsewhere. This was not solely because of the rhetoric of geopolitical responsibility in relation to these former clients that was maintained by people like Primakov, especially after his move in early 1996 from the position of chief of external intelligence to head of the Foreign Ministry.²⁸ As Bobo Lo points out, during this time, Moscow neglected both the “far” and the “near abroad” by conducting a reactive policy driven by a West-centric outlook: “Resources were invested not in developing productive bilateral and multilateral relations, but in responding to individual events and/or actions by outside, predominantly Western, parties.”²⁹ The key aim, according to Mark N. Katz, was not to compete with the United States but to make Russia, backed up by its allies, an indispensable player capable of keeping US unilateralism in check.³⁰

The best way of achieving this goal was indeed to try and build good, or at least non-conflictual, relations with key stakeholders. While Russia did not have the capacity to actively engage in the Middle East, it was at least trying to build up trust and capitalize on the history of mutual engagement, where available. Thus, as early as the 1990s, Russia advocated a gradual phasing out of sanctions against Iraq, arguing that isolation of Saddam Hussein’s regime would not make the region more secure. It strongly condemned the 1998 air strikes on Iraq by US and UK forces and worked with other states—most notably China and France—on alternative solutions in the UN framework.³¹ Similarly, it was the only significant country that did not choose sides in the 1994 Yemen civil war, trying instead to mediate between various factions. All of that pointed to what were to become the key principles of Russian diplomacy in the early twenty-first century: the primacy of sovereign statehood and a strong preference for what it calls “universal and comprehensive” security arrangements based on equally respecting the interests of all parties. Explicit...