BY JULIA IOFFE
In Monday’s press briefing, coming after a
weekend in which Moscow increased its military footprint in Syria seemingly
exponentially, White House press secretary Josh Earnest declared that the administration had come no closer
to deciphering Moscow’s motives for its stepped-up presence in the area.
The truth is Russia’s motives are not that hard
to divine.
The most proximate reason is the fact that
Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s embattled, murderous leader, has been losing territory at a rapid pace. In July, he made a rare
announcement admitting losses and blaming them on a shortage of
manpower. “We are not collapsing,” he said, which is not something regimes that
are not collapsing often have to proclaim publicly. Allowing Assad to continue
on the same losing trajectory is anathema to Moscow. “Bashar al-Assad is losing;
he’s losing one town after another,” said Georgy Mirsky, a vintage Russian
Arabist who teaches Middle Eastern conflicts at Moscow’s Higher School of
Economics. “If you don’t help Assad, he’ll lose and then the whole world will
say Putin lost.” Putin placed his bet on Assad four years ago, Mirsky said, and
he hasn’t wavered since. Now he has become a prisoner to that bet and to a
certain honor-bound logic. “If you make a bet on a horse and the horse comes in
last, then how does it look?” Mirsky explained. “It looks like you don’t
understand anything. You will be seen as a loser.”
Russia has always supported Assad, but that
support now seems to be inadequate to stanch the bleeding. To avoid looking
like a loser who bet on the wrong horse — which, incidentally, Putin has done a
lot of in the Middle East — Putin simply has to put more on the scale to
maintain the same equilibrium.
Why prop up Assad? Some commentators have pointed to what they see as a burgeoning Russian
influence in the region, but many in Moscow see it differently. This talk is
“slightly exaggerated,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, who is no Kremlin critic.
“Russia doesn’t have many opportunities in the region, and Syria is a unique
case.” Russia, he said, is simply stepping into the void left behind by
American waffling and a lack of clarity in its Syria policy. “The growth of
Russian influence is directly proportional to the decline of American influence
in the region,” Lukyanov explained. “The United States lost its mission so
maybe the other regional powers see Russia as bad and unpleasant, but they also
see that it acts clearly and consistently.” And yet, Lukyanov said, Russia’s
expanded horizon for action in the region “is all thanks to Syria. It all starts and ends in Syria.”
Other, more hard-line voices in Moscow are
gloating over this role reversal, however exaggerated or mild. During the Arab
Spring, Moscow lost influence in the Middle East, while America again seemed to
be recovering the stature it lost after the invasion of Iraq. Now America can’t
seem to find its way in the region, while Russia is acting boldly, uninhibited
by the agony of indecision gripping the White House. Now America needs Russia,
not the other way around. Secretary of State John Kerry has spoken of the need to cooperate with Russia in Syria; and Defense
Secretary Ashton Carter and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu talked “deconfliction” in the Syrian skies. Even Obama, who has long refused
to meet with Putin because of Russian action in Ukraine, has acceded to meeting
the Russian president to discuss Syria. America needs Russia, which means
Russia has gotten away with its Ukraine heist — and the Russians are loving it.
“The U.S. needs
cooperation on Syria more than Russia,” tweeted Aleksey Pushkov, the
throaty chairman of the Russian parliament’s committee for foreign affairs.“Without
it, the U.S. will find itself playing second fiddle and will lose the battle
for world opinion.”
And that, too, is part of the goal: restoring Russia as
a leader of world opinion after the reputational damage it suffered in Ukraine,
muscling in as a power broker that needs to be consulted in important crises
far from its borders and sphere of influence. Putin has long railed against the evils of a
“unipolar world,” that is, a world in which only America calls the shots,
without the countervailing forces of Russian policy. Now, the reticence of the
Obama administration to do more in Syria gives Putin a much wider seat at the
table and a much louder voice in determining what a political solution in
what’s left of Syria looks like.
But even members of the reliably shrill pro-Kremlin
chorus seem to admit that nobody but Russia likes this configuration — and that
Russia, like Pushkov said, doesn’t really need this at all.
Sergei Markov, head of the Institute of Political Studies and a member of
Russia’s Civic Chamber — who told me that the
United States “waged a hybrid war against Russia in Ukraine” and that “Assad is
the most civilized politician in the region” — said that Moscow simply had to
take up this mantle of responsibility. “Russia’s role is growing not because
Russia wants a greater role,” Markov explained. “Putin doesn’t want a greater
role. Russia just has to fill the vacuum that is left by the departure of the
United States. The policy of United States has an irrational quality, and
therefore it has catastrophic consequences for the region. The elites of the
region have to distance themselves from the United States and work with
Russia.” Moscow, he went on, would rather be dealing with Ukraine. “Russia has
to be distracted by Syria because there is a vacuum forming there that, if
Russia doesn’t fill it, becomes dangerous for Russia” because of the presence
of the Islamic State, Markov explained. “It’s not proactive. It’s done out of
necessity.”
Why does Russia absolutely need to fill a vacuum?
Because it still sees itself as a great power locked in an endless struggle with
the other great power, the United States. And if the United States, feeling
that its interests are undermined by getting sucked into the Syrian civil war,
leaves a space unoccupied on the game board, Russia feels it has to take over
that space, simply because its interests can be roughly articulated as “more is
better.” And now, for once, Russian foreign policy and American foreign policy
seem to complement each other.
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