What Is Russia Up To in the Middle East?

by Dmitri Trenin

The “Afghan syndrome” commanded Moscow to never again seek to impose one’s ideology and one’s rule on a Muslim country.

The conclusions that Moscow eventually drew from its engagement in Libya could be summarized as the West is not to be trusted—once they pocket your concession, they ignore you; the United States and its allies have no compunctions about going beyond the limits set by UN resolutions; Americans and Europeans are guided by grand but faulty ideologies and petty interests, as they lack strategic vision and fail to foresee even the immediate consequences of their actions. Thus, going forward the Libya experience would not be repeated in Russia’s foreign policy. These conclusions had an immediate effect in Syria, where an uprising against the Assad regime started in March 2011.

Russia is not a newcomer to the region. It has a rich history of involvement there. Traditionally, Russia was mostly looking at the region from a geopolitical perspective. Security factors played a salient role in the Russian calculus. Often, the Middle East was a playground where Russia competed against rival great powers. In the globalized, interconnected environment of the twenty-first century, the Middle East as the heart of the turbulent Muslim world has a direct bearing on developments within Russia’s own sizable and growing indigenous Muslim community. Thus, Russia’s global standing as a great power and its own integrity and stability depend to a significant degree on how it fares in the Middle East. In 2015, President Putin decided to intervene militarily in Syria, which involved Russia for the first time in its history in a war in the Arab world. That ongoing experience, which is discussed in the next chapter, will shape Russia’s role in the region and beyond for years to come.

What it was and what it remains is a crucially important geopolitical position in the region that keeps Moscow intensely interested.