Financial Times
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet face-to-face for the first time this week, on the margins of the G20 summit at Hamburg. They have much to discuss. Yet one area they cannot avoid is Syria, where the US and Russia, so far more through their proxies than directly, are coming perilously close to conflict. Outright war is unlikely but not impossible. The points of friction are multiplying. Intentionally or not, the two powers are in abrasive competition.
Mr Putin has chosen Syria and the Middle East as the unsettled setting to stage Russia’s comeback as a great power, and looks more than willing to kick over a few regional tables on his way back to the top international one. While Mr Trump, by contrast, does not seem to have a firm agenda, he appears to be allowing his generals to expand military action in both Iraq and Syria, not just to defeat Isis but to thwart the influence of Iran, Russia’s ally. Plenty of accidents are waiting to happen.
Another way of looking at this is to ask whether Russia is winning in the Middle East, where the US was by far the dominant power — after the second world war, throughout the cold war, and up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its disastrous aftermath. That takes us back to before the startling arrival of Mr Trump in the White House.
In September 2015, just as he dispatched Russia’s air force to Syria to rescue the regime of Bashar al-Assad from defeat by mainly Sunni rebels, Mr Putin used the UN general assembly to mock President Barack Obama. With Iraq after 2003, and Libya and Syria after 2011 as his main exhibits, he cited US and western policies of regime change as the most reliable ally of Sunni jihadism and incubator of Isis. “Do you know what you have done?” he thundered.
Mr Putin’s Russia may be revisionist in Europe but in the Middle East it is a status quo power. Whereas the US backs the post-Iraq war government in Baghdad and has opposed the Assads in Damascus, Moscow supports incumbents in both.
Both sides, however, can claim some measure of success. Russia can point to its triumph at Aleppo, Syria’s erstwhile great trading city, where the rebel-held east fell in December, a turning point after six years of pitiless war. The US and its allies are within days of victory over Isis at Mosul, Iraq’s great northern city, captured by the jihadis in a lightning offensive three years ago.
But, air strikes aside, how are the two powers competing? Russia, shocked at the depleted Assad army, relies on Iran’s revolutionary guards and its paramilitary proxies, such as Hizbollah and Iraqi Shia militia. Iraq has partially rebuilt its hollowed-out army but the US is dependent on Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria, as well as in de facto alignment with Iran-backed Shia militia in Iraq. Russia and the US can try drawing clear lines in the air — with temporarily suspended “deconfliction” hotlines to prevent their warplanes shooting each other down — but the mess on the ground is a lot more complicated, and bound to get more so.
In spite of this, with the US administration in disarray, and Mr Trump tweeting attitude more than making coherent policy, Russia looks to be ahead on points.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, in a forthcoming book titled What is Russia up to in the Middle East?, argues that Mr Putin’s intervention to save the Assad regime is not so much about Syria or even the Middle East but the global order, and Moscow’s determination to deal with the US as an equal.
He points out that Moscow “emerged from its military engagement in Syria with the most connections in the region”, staying in close touch with the leaders of Turkey, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, he says, Russia “managed to avoid . . . falling into the cracks of Middle Eastern divides: Shia versus Sunni; Saudi versus Iran; Iran versus Israel; Turkey versus Kurds, etc” — the mark of a true global player. Yet Mr Trenin cautiously describes this as “a provisional result”, and rightly so.
While Mr Putin may have avoided “divides” for now, he is allying with powers for whom exploiting and creating divisions is second nature. Iran does it between the Arabs.. Washington’s ostensible lack of interest in Iraq and Syria after Isis is also a problem for Moscow. Mr Putin remains tied to Syria’s future, which is in turn linked to Iraq’s. Neither looks pretty, and both are tied to Iran, Russia’s ally and the US’s enemy — a good topic for the Hamburg talks.
Mr Putin’s array of “connections” does indeed outstrip the US’s, but on a state basis in what has become a paramilitarised arena of failing states. He still has to prove he can stay clear of the treacherous coils and chaos of local intrigue.