Moscow recently confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani this Wednesday to discuss the current state of Syria. Unsurprisingly, this meeting mimics the composition of a summit held not too long ago in Sochi in November 2017, with both the same guests and the same topic of discussion. These series of summits allude nervously to the declining role of the United States in Syria—and the potential consequences of the United States’ departure.
Prior to the November meeting, Putin invited Syrian President Bashar Assad to his vacation home in Sochi, one of the few trips Assad is speculated to have made outside of Syria in the last two years. And furthermore, following the meeting, Putin reached out to President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and King Salman of Saudi Arabia, briefing those who were not invited to attend but still had significant interests in the region. Indeed, if Putin’s actions both before and after the November 2017 summit are any indication of what Wednesday has in store, Putin envisions himself as a linchpin not only between the Assad-supporting Tehran and the rebel-backing Ankara but as a larger outside intermediary between the West and the Middle East.
Following the November summit, the meeting was heralded by The Guardian as “a display of Russia’s restored influence in the Middle East” and writers at the BBC speculated that “Two years on, Russia appears to have proved the doomsayers [such as former President Obama] wrong.” In a part of the world where power is often procured through quelling rivalries, the recent confirmation of the April summit indicates that Putin continues to posit himself as a strange broker of stability in the region.
As author and former Soviet military office Dmitri Trenin argues in his book What is Russia up to in the Middle East?, Moscow learned from its disastrous Afghanistan campaign and has combined this knowledge with a historical aversion to regime change (see the various “color” revolutions of the 21st century) in order to craft its foreign policy approach. Therefore, as Trenin notes, Moscow no longer invests heavily in long-term or permanent alliances, instead seeing itself as a force capable of adapting its perspective and shifting friendships, as it sees fit, within the unstable landscape of the Middle East.
The implications of the Kremlin’s outlook, with particular regards to Syria, could have far-reaching consequences, given that a foreign policy driven almost exclusively by preventing power from changing hands leaves little space for meaningful political growth or revision in a region desperately in need of such.
And with Putin continuing to insert himself as a key player within the post-Syrian War negotiations, Trump’s recent warnings of U.S. withdrawal from Syria seem particularly advantageous for Putin, allowing Putin to become the chief “power broker” in that area.
While there is virtually no way to know the extent of America’s capacity to establish a long-term plan for peace in the region, in the short-term, there is an opportunity for the United States to hold its ground in Syria with limited troop presence.
It is likely that the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be willing to share the brunt of the military and financial operation, although Trump’s recent announcement suggests he seems less inclined to this targeted option.
If Trump will forfeit our influence in the region to Russia and its Iranian partner, we, as well as our allies, must come terms with the disastrous consequences of that decision. As enticing as the thought of putting Syria behind us sounds, sometimes simply walking away carries tremendous costs; a Russia-backed Iranian hegemony, ranging all the way to the Mediterranean, will enable Iran and its bloodthirsty IRGC to hold the region hostage. Russian air power will, in short order, allow Iran’s weapons to encircle our allies and hold a knife to our throats, leaving us with no options.
The challenge of countering Russia’s role in the Middle East is that much of the damage has already been done. Over the course of his presidency, former President Barack Obama engineered what he believed to be a hand-off of regional hegemony to the Iranians. In order to accomplish this, the White House invited the Russians back into the Middle East—four decades after Henry Kissinger in the 1970s took great pains to eject them. The public and policymakers alike need to understand that the wages of our current mess in Syria, and the reason our options are so few, date back to this Obama-era diplomatic sleight of hand. At once, Russia had a foot in the door, committing its own military to the region to protect its interests. And with Russia’s ability to control the skies bordering on Israel, the conflict in Syria suddenly became a lot more important to regional and global security.
At this point, another approach the United States can take, in addition to maintaining some troop presence in Syria, is to make Russia and Iran as unattractive to one another as possible. Despite a nuclear-armed Iran being less than ideal for Russia, the contentious negotiations surrounding the Iranian nuclear deal posed its own advantages to Moscow, giving it the forum to peacock its newfound allegiance to Iran.
If the United States were to rip up the Iran Deal, as Trump has discussed, it would signal to Iran the limitations of the Kremlin’s power. The Kremlin is cognizant of this risk; Trump’s threats to abandon the deal earlier this year elicited a panicked, dramatic response from Putin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. And while Russia certainly would prefer a non-nuclear Iran, it also enjoys the fruits of Iran’s increasing dominion in the region, which is only emboldened by the prospect of a nuclear Iran.
As it stands now, the Iran Deal does little more than enable Iran to build nuclear weapons—now with the cover of an international consensus that’s more interested in making money with Tehran than in checking its regional and global ambitions. Backing out of the nuclear deal would allow for the U.S. to put renewed, serious nuclear sanctions in place against Iran, thus complicating Iran’s attempts at regional dominance by arresting the cash flow that makes its violent adventurism possible.
The situation in Syria and the greater Middle East offers the United States few options, but there are steps the Trump administration can take in order to lessen the influence of the Russian-Iranian alliance, namely maintaining a foothold in Damascus and working to fracture the friendship between Moscow and Tehran. It starts with Trump not exiting Syria.
Erielle Davidson (@politicalelle) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an economic research assistant at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
