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Executive Summary

The 2015 Russian military intervention in Syria was a pivotal moment for Moscow’s Middle East policy. Largely absent from the Middle East for the better part of the previous two decades, Russia intervened to save Bashar al-Assad’s regime and reasserted itself as a major player in the region’s power politics. Moscow’s bold use of military power positioned it as an important actor in the Middle East.

The intervention took place against the backdrop of a United States pulling back from the Middle East and growing uncertainty about its future role there. The geopolitical realignment and instability caused by the civil wars in Libya and Syria and the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia have opened opportunities for Russia to rebuild some of the old relationships and to build new ones.

The most dramatic turnaround in relations in recent years has occurred between Russia and Israel. The new quality of the relationship owes a great deal to the personal diplomacy between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Russia’s emergence as a major presence in Syria has meant that the Israelis now have no choice but to maintain good relations with their new “neighbor.” Some Israeli officials hope that Moscow will help them deal with the biggest threat they face from Syria—Iran and its client Hezbollah. So far, Russia has delivered some, but far from all that Israel wants from it, and there are precious few signs that Russia intends to break with Iran, its partner and key ally in Syria.

Russian-Iranian relations have undergone an unusual transformation as a result of the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war. Their joint victory is likely to lead to a divergence of their interests. Russia is interested in returning Syria to the status quo ante and reaping the benefits of peace and reconstruction. Iran is interested in exploiting Syria as a platform in its campaign against Israel. Russia lacks the military muscle and the diplomatic leverage to influence Iran. That poses a big obstacle to Moscow’s ambitions in the Middle East.

Russian-Turkish relations have received an upgrade as a result of Russia’s intervention in Syria. Russian-Turkish relations have been improving since the fall of the Soviet Union; trade and energy ties as well as a shared sense of alienation from the West are now the key drivers of that relationship. The Russian intervention in Syria gave it a new quality, however, since it changed the Turkish calculus in Syria and left Ankara with no alternative to going along with Russian priorities there. The rift between Turkey and the West because of the former’s authoritarian politics has deepened rapprochement with Russia. However, the relationship remains well short of a real partnership given the geopolitical, cultural, and historical differences that divide them.

Much like Turkey, Saudi Arabia had no choice but to upgrade its relationship with Russia. In addition to its stake in the outcome of the Syria conflict and rivalry with Iran, Saudi Arabia has a growing interest in coordinating oil production with Russia at a time when both are grappling with a surge in U.S. energy production. Saudi King Salman’s 2017 visit to Moscow was a historic first, and the two energy superpowers have pledged to coordinate their oil export policies, but much like the Israelis, the Saudis are likely to be disappointed in their hope that better relations with Russia could lead it to abandon its partnership with Iran. Still, with influential U.S. voices arguing for reducing the U.S. commitment to the Middle East, good relations with Russia provide an additional, even if not very reliable, hedge against uncertainty.

Russia’s return to North Africa too has to be considered against the backdrop of the United States’ disengagement from the region. The relationship between Moscow and Cairo, interrupted in the 1970s with the latter’s pivot toward the United States, underwent a significant upgrade after the 2013 coup in Egypt and the rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to the presidency. Criticized in the West for his human rights abuses, Sisi found in Putin a convenient partner to help shore up his domestic standing and leverage vis-à-vis Washington. Egypt has emerged as an important customer for Russian arms. Russia and Egypt have partnered in supporting one of the factions in the Libyan civil war, the Libyan National Army, but the country remains too badly fractured for the LNA to score a decisive victory. Moscow expects to have a say in negotiations about the conflict and to reestablish commercial opportunities derailed by Muammar Qaddafi’s demise.

By reversing the course of the Syrian civil war and saving an old client, Moscow sent a message to other Middle Eastern regimes that it is a reliable partner. Hardly anyone would question that Moscow has positioned itself as an important geopolitical and military actor at the proverbial crossroads of the world following decades of undisputed U.S. military superiority. Russia has positioned itself as a valuable interlocutor to all parties to the region’s conflicts.

That said, one of Russia’s key accomplishments is also symbolic of the limits of its power and influence in the Middle East. In a region torn by fierce rivalries, the ability to talk to everyone without taking sides has limited utility. Absent major capabilities for power projection and economic resources, and with its diplomatic capital confined largely to a well-advertised willingness to talk to all parties, Russia’s clout is not sufficient to resolve any of the region’s myriad problems.

For the United States, Russia’s return to the Middle East is important, but hardly a seismic shift. Much of what Russia has accomplished is owed to the United States reconsidering its commitments in the region. The challenge for the United States is to define and defend its own interests there, to gain a better understanding of Russian interests and policy drivers, and to explore the extent to which U.S. and Russian interests truly clash and where they do not. As U.S. decisionmakers develop U.S. policy in the Middle East, they will need to think more creatively about how to build on the successful deconfliction effort with Russia in Syria and develop a model of coexistence in the region as a whole.

Introduction

The Russian military intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015 marked the major turning point in the Syrian civil war and Russia’s return to the Middle East as a major power player after a decades-long absence. Russian airpower, in cooperation with Iranian boots on the ground, reversed the course of the war and saved Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government from imminent collapse. Russian President Vladimir Putin used that victory to rekindle old partnerships and strike up new ones. He has convened conferences to decide the fate of post–civil war Syria, exchanged visits with long-standing U.S. allies in the Middle East, and signed deals to sell them weapons and nuclear power plants. Russia seems resurgent from the Persian Gulf to North Africa especially as the United States, worn out by nearly two decades of endless wars, appears eager to minimize its commitments in the region. Unwilling to stand in the way of Russian ambitions, U.S. policy has become increasingly erratic and disruptive for long-standing adversaries and allies alike.

President Donald Trump’s October 2019 decision to withdraw the remaining U.S. troops from northern Syria and in effect green-light Turkey’s military action against U.S.-aligned Kurdish-led militias is the most dramatic manifestation of Washington’s desire to put an end to nearly two decades of war. It has magnified the impression of a hasty U.S. retreat from the Middle East and Russian ascendancy. Adding insult to injury, U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria coincided with triumphant visits by Putin to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both long-standing U.S. allies.

However, a sober assessment of the Kremlin’s pursuits across the Middle East suggests that the image of its ascendancy is somewhat of an exaggeration, and that the actual accomplishments of Russian diplomacy across the region are far more modest than they seem at first blush. Of course, the Kremlin’s accomplishments to date should not be minimized or ignored. But the single biggest accomplishment—a shared victory in the Syrian civil war—that has positioned Russia as the key power in the war-torn country, comes with a host of major diplomatic, military, and economic challenges, which make the task of winning the peace even more daunting than winning the war.

From the Persian Gulf to North Africa, nimble Russian diplomacy has produced an array of trade and investment-related deals and joint declarations about expanded cooperation in various spheres. However, a closer look at this impressive pattern of activity makes clear that the practical implementation of these agreements and deals is lagging or remains unfulfilled. Russia’s trade with the Middle East remains exceedingly modest, and there is little likelihood that this state of affairs will change in the foreseeable future.

This study offers a broad overview of Russian policy in the Middle East in the past decade, its origins, its key drivers, its accomplishments, especially since the 2015 military intervention in Syria, as well as its prospects. It examines Russia’s relationships with key Middle Eastern powers—Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran. And it concludes with implications for U.S. interests and recommendations for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Why?—The Drivers of Russian Policy

Why is Russia returning to the Middle East? What explains its ambition to reestablish itself as a power broker in the tumultuous region? Why is it seeking a major role in a region where major powers, including the Soviet Union, have seen their ambitions thwarted and fortunes wasted in pursuit of grandiose plans? The short answer is because the Middle East is the crossroads of the world, where tradition, interests, and political ambition all mandate an active Russian presence.

Yet for some observers, the Russian military intervention in Syria that positioned it as a force in Middle Eastern politics has been easy to dismiss as a mistake or a potential invitation to plunge into new quagmires.¹ That would be wrong. It was the absence of Russia from the region in the aftermath of the Cold War that was a major departure from the norm. Moscow’s post-2015 active presence marked the resumption of centuries-old Russian involvement in the region’s affairs.

Russian involvement in Middle Eastern affairs dates back to the reign of Peter the Great and the founding of the modern Russian state, if not earlier. As is the case with many such long-standing foreign policy pursuits, Russian policy has combined elements of geopolitics and great-power competition with ideology and religion. At various times in history, Russian armed forces fought land battles against Persian, Turkish, British, and French armies, and confronted their navies in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

In the more recent past, after World War II, the Soviet Union emerged as a major presence in Middle Eastern affairs, securing partnerships with Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and establishing itself as the key backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Soviet involvement in Middle Eastern affairs during the Cold War was multifaceted and entailed economic and technical assistance, military assistance and training, arms sales, and even direct involvement in the region’s conflicts in support of client-states. The Soviet Union was a key party to efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Soviet Navy became a regular presence in the Mediterranean. Former U.S. officials recalled Soviet threats to intervene in and the risks of U.S.-Soviet confrontations in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars.²

Russian policy in the Middle East has had multiple and diverse drivers. Geopolitical and ideological factors were influenced by its religious and cultural ties to the vast region where the Russian and Ottoman Empires played out their long-standing rivalry, from the Balkans to Asia Minor and the Levant. Over time, these drivers included the quest for warm water ports and territorial expansion, protection of fellow Orthodox Christian believers and Slavs oppressed under Ottoman rule, and support for various postcolonial or revolutionary movements and regimes. Russia was wholly engaged in the outright great-power competition for influence in the contested region, where all major powers of the day had interests and sought to project power and influence.³

Beyond history and tradition, Russian ambition to return to the Middle East can be explained by the region’s proximity to Russia’s borders. The claim to a major role in the affairs of the Mediterranean by virtue of being a Black Sea power has deep roots in Russian strategic thought and policy.⁴ Geography not only drives Russian geopolitical ambitions, but also has obvious consequences for Russian national security. Considering the difficult terrain and porous borders of its neighbors, the prospect of instability in the Levant spilling over into Russia’s restive Caucasus region is a problem no Russian national security analyst or official can ignore. Even when there are legitimate differences of opinion on how to best secure Russia against that contingency, the existence of this problem cannot be denied.

Nor can anyone deny that Russia has interests in the region beyond historical attachments and security. It may seem, on the basis of mere statistics that bilateral trade with most individual countries is not a major driver of Russian policy in the Middle East as a whole because the region overall ranks relatively low among Russian trading partners. Russia’s only significant trading partner in the Middle East in 2017 was Turkey, with the total trade volume just under $16.5 billion.⁵ It was the fifth-largest market for Russian goods (and fourteenth-largest source of imports to Russia).

But numbers can be misleading. Several countries in the region—Algeria, Egypt, Iraq—have been historically significant buyers of Russian weapons. The arms industry is an influential interest group in Russia and arms sales have long been more than just another source of revenue for this sector of the Russian economy. During the lean times, when the Russian military’s procurement budgets dried up, arms exports were crucial to sustaining the industry. More recently, arms exports have also served as an important tool of Russian foreign policy.

By far the most important Russian economic interest in the Middle East is in the region’s role as the supplier of oil and gas to the global economy. As one of the world’s top three producers of hydrocarbons, Russia has a vital stake in the future of the global oil and gas marketplace. The activities of Middle Eastern oil and—increasingly—gas producers have direct bearing on Russian economic well-being and political stability. Although Russia and Middle Eastern producers are competitors, they are increasingly having to coordinate their activities as their previously dominant positions as energy superpowers are being challenged by the entry of new sources of supply and technologies.

Several Middle Eastern states have also expressed interest in investing in the Russian economy. While expressions of interest have so far exceeded actual amounts invested, they are not to be dismissed. For Russia, struggling to overcome the twin obstacles of U.S. and EU sanctions and its own poor investment climate, the prospect of investments by some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds is important and welcome as proof of its ability to break out of international isolation and economic potential.

Last, but not least, there is the domestic political context of Russian foreign policy. Throughout Putin’s tenure at the helm, making Russia great again has been a major stated objective of Russian foreign policy and Putin’s domestic political platform. The 2015 Russian military intervention in Syria was a critical milestone in that pursuit—a high-profile military deployment in a region long dominated by the United States, challenging the “indispensable nation’s” monopoly on decisionmaking in the Middle East. Coming on the heels of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Syrian deployment was an important juncture not merely in Russian policy in the Middle East, but Russian foreign policy in general. A successful intervention in Syria would demonstrate to Washington and Brussels that their policy of isolating Russia, marginalizing it in world affairs, and forcing it to retreat under the weight of U.S.-EU sanctions was doomed to fail; Russia could be neither marginalized nor isolated, and it would not retreat.

For decades and centuries prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loss of territories that long had been part of the Russian Empire, Russian presence in the Middle East had been recognized as a natural phenomenon, a major element of the region’s complex politics and the broader context of great-power politics. Its legitimacy was hardly ever questioned. It was to be opposed, as it was in the nineteenth century, when the United Kingdom and France fought Russia in Crimea; competed against, as the United States and its allies sought to do throughout the Cold War; but not questioned as an aberration. Arguably, even the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea was consistent with Russia’s traditional pursuit of unimpeded access to the Mediterranean. The Kremlin justified it to the Russian public in terms of historical continuity with earlier centuries’ struggles and victories. One does not need to put much stock in this propaganda to conclude that with Russia’s return to the Middle East in 2015, the geopolitics of the region is not entering a new phase, but returning to a status quo ante.

This study offers an overview of Russia’s return to the Middle East as a major actor and of the crucial role its intervention in Syria in 2015 has played in that undertaking. The intervention in the Syrian civil war occurred against the backdrop of the United States trying to disengage from the turbulent region thus greatly reducing the risk of a U.S.-Russian confrontation. U.S. disengagement from the Middle East has also created multiple opportunities for Russia to reach out to U.S. partners seeking reassurance in a time of uncertainty—in the Levant, in the Persian Gulf, and in North Africa. Notwithstanding Moscow’s success in building or restoring important ties in these regions, it has neither the means nor the ambition to fill the vacuum resulting from the United States’ pullback. The Kremlin appears careful not to overextend itself and content to remain as an indispensable actor—one whose presence is necessary, even if not sufficient, to address the region’s many problems. Moreover, the advantage that Russia has enjoyed since returning to Middle Eastern politics—the ability to talk to all parties—is also a key limiting factor in its pursuit of a further enhanced role in the region. To move beyond being everyone’s interlocutor and become a true power broker in the Middle East would require taking sides in the major conflict tearing the region apart—between Iran and virtually everyone else. So far, Russia has not been willing or able to take that step and instead appears intent on remaining the party everyone can talk to.

The Retreat in the 1990s

The 1990s were a period of a broad and deep Russian retrenchment from the world stage, and the Middle East was no exception to that phenomenon. The post-Soviet Russian economy was in no position to sustain an active military presence or any real degree of diplomatic, economic, or humanitarian engagement in the Middle East. The lack of resources severely affected its military establishment and restricted its capabilities for power projection.

The Middle East held little attraction for the cash-strapped Russian state. As a major exporter of hydrocarbons, it was a competitor rather than a market for the Russian economy. The predominantly Muslim countries of the region were hardly natural partners to Russia while it conducted a brutal military campaign to suppress the rebellion of Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus. The preeminent position of the United States in the Middle East left little room for Russia to expand its influence there with its few remaining resources. Both literally and figuratively speaking, it was outgunned and outresourced. It was in no shape to compete, let alone outcompete.

What was left was a relatively modest level of diplomatic activity centered around the principle, but at the time seemingly abstract, motivation behind Russian foreign policy: a multipolar world. According to an influential policy blueprint pushed by Yevgeniy Primakov, who served as both foreign minister from 1996 to 1998 and prime minister from 1998 to 1999, Russia along with China and India would form a global counterweight to the United States.⁶ In the eyes of Russian policymakers, their Cold War opponent aspired to perpetuate the unipolar model and single-handedly run the world. However, the Middle East was not home to any major power that could meaningfully join the Russia-China-India coalition. Rather, the region was a uniquely important arena for competition, where U.S. dominance could be challenged once Russia gained the necessary resources to do so.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the most important relationship that Russia was able to sustain in the Middle East was its ties with Iran. That too, however, was at least in part a reflection of Russia’s weakness rather than strength. The Russian-Iranian relationship was less a product of active Russian diplomacy than of Iran’s international pariah status and need for partners. For Russia, Iran’s isolation presented a unique opportunity to sustain its claim as a power with Middle East interests and a major voice in the international community’s efforts to limit the Iranian nuclear program.

Beyond the relationship with Iran, Russia managed to sustain its relationship with Syria, including the naval facility in Tartus, arms sales, and Soviet-era debt forgiveness. The Syrian foothold also served as a useful platform for intelligence collection on U.S. and Israeli activities. That relationship generally was perceived as Russia’s last outpost in the Middle East, more a sign of its regional insignificance than a springboard for projecting its power and influence.

Elsewhere, the Russian presence in the region during that period manifested itself mostly in the pursuit of market opportunities for its struggling arms industry, as well as a largely inconsequential diplomatic engagement intended to show that Russia was still interested in maintaining ties to the region. It was not seen as a major actor, not even remotely comparable to the United States. The George W. Bush administration ignored Russian protestations against the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Moscow’s former client—and Russia could do little to change that.

Always suspicious of grassroots prodemocracy movements and fearing the West’s encouragement of them—especially as the United States embraced democracy promotion as one of its major foreign policy goals—Moscow was quick to blame the 2011 Arab Spring on the United States’ reckless subversion of the existing order and the legitimate governments in the Middle East. For Russian officials, the Libya intervention by the United States and its allies, which led to the downfall of the long-lived regime of Muammar Qaddafi, and the West’s endorsement of the antiregime protests in Syria were more than enough evidence that turmoil in the Middle East was a product of U.S. geopolitical designs on the region. The fact that the Arab Spring followed the invasion of Iraq, undertaken in the name of democratizing the region; then president Barack Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009; and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s statements in 2012 that the Assad regime had lost its legitimacy and “must go” supplied further proof of Washington’s unilateral, unipolar, disruptive agenda in the Middle East.⁷

The Syrian Pivot

The unrest in Syria, which began in 2011 and soon escalated into a full-fledged civil war, was the catalyst for a qualitative change in Russia’s involvement in the Middle East. Several major considerations were apparent in the Kremlin’s decision to step up its involvement in the Syrian conflict. Syria, as mentioned earlier, was the last remaining foothold in the Middle East that Moscow could count as its client-state—Iran was too big and pursued a far too independent foreign policy to be considered a Russian client. Syria was home to the last remaining Russian military—in this case, naval—facility in the Middle East and Russia’s biggest electronic eavesdropping post outside its territory in Latakia.⁸ The Kremlin’s relationship with the ruling Assad family extended back to the 1970s.

The new chapter in Moscow’s Middle East policy began against the backdrop of a general deterioration of relations between Russia and the West. Disagreements with Washington about the handling of the escalating conflict in Syria intensified as the Obama-era “reset” faded, and tensions between Moscow and Washington rose with Putin’s return to the presidency amid U.S. criticism of Putin’s crackdown on domestic protests. The crisis in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 swept aside all interest in a cooperative relationship on both sides, with the exception of a handful of vitally important issues. In this context, the increased Russian involvement in Syria acquired a poignant anti-U.S. aspect.

Russian engagement in Syria has evolved over a period of several years. It began with mostly political, diplomatic, and economic support for the Assad regime, and escalated into direct military engagement with boots on the ground and airpower in the sky. This evolution has been a direct product of the changing fortunes of the Assad regime.

Victory from the Jaws of Defeat

Russian involvement in Syria intensified as the civil war inside the country escalated and the conflict increasingly occupied the center stage of international diplomacy. The initial protests and the Assad regime’s suppression of them were met with different, but parallel and escalating responses from Washington and Moscow. The Obama administration viewed the protests as a legitimate effort by the nascent Syrian prodemocracy forces and an expression of the Syrian people’s desire for a more open, representative government. Accordingly, the administration condemned the Assad regime’s actions to suppress the protests. As the conflict escalated into a full-fledged civil war, the United States provided political, diplomatic, and material support for the anti-Assad forces. The Russian government, for its part, condemned the protests as an illegitimate, foreign-inspired attempt at regime change; branded the opposition as terrorists; endorsed the actions of the Assad regime to suppress them; and also provided material support for Assad to do so.

As the confrontation intensified and U.S. condemnation of the Assad regime grew stronger, so did Russian actions to support Assad. In the United Nations Security Council, Russia stymied U.S. efforts to apply international pressure on Assad to force him to ease his oppression of the opposition and negotiate with it. Joined by China, Russia put up an insurmountable barrier to the United States’ push to impose comprehensive sanctions, including a ban on arms deliveries and financial transactions, on the Syrian government.

In the meantime, Iran also emerged as a critical participant in the conflict willing to intervene with boots on the ground.⁹ Tehran’s and Moscow’s confluence of interests in supporting Bashar al-Assad reinforced their partnership, with Russia providing extensive material and diplomatic assistance, as well as intelligence support, to the embattled Syrian regime, and Iran providing the manpower to fight the regime’s opponents.¹⁰

This partnership and division of labor also planted the seeds of future tensions in the Iranian-Russian relationship. As argued below, in the discussion of Russia’s relations with Iran, notwithstanding the confluence of their interests in supporting the Assad regime, their longer-term interests diverge. Reconciling them while Russia pursues a more expansive agenda in the Middle East is and will continue to be a complicated diplomatic challenge for Moscow.

With Syria engulfed in a full-scale civil war, Russia justified its support for the Assad regime as a legitimate form of assistance to a friendly government under assault from illegal, foreign-inspired, and foreign-supplied opposition groups and terrorist cells. Russian officials stressed that their actions were being undertaken at the request and with full consent of the legitimate, internationally recognized Syrian government. Russian commentators also noted that the emergence of the so-called Islamic State, which occupied and established its capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa and posed a major threat to the Assad regime, was a direct consequence of the United States’ destabilizing invasion of Iraq and premature withdrawal, which left behind a broken country. Thus, Russian support for the Syrian government was portrayed as part of an international campaign against terrorism, as practiced by both the Islamic State and other, less prominent groups that Moscow claimed were a significant part of the anti-Assad forces.

This diplomatic, economic, and military campaign