It is time now for Washington to look at Moscow’s intervention in Syria from a wider strategic perspective than the usual rhetoric about Vladimir Putin’s fecklessness.
Putin believes that the US will push to create an independent Kurdistan in Iraq and protect it as a new militarized satellite in the Middle East.
Washington would see a new Kurdistan as a regrettable but unavoidable outcome since Iraq’s Shia-led government protected by Iran no longer seems interested in pushing strongly to build an inclusive and secular political democracy.
However, Moscow reads its own regional security interests differently. Whether under Putin or someone else, it cannot permit a situation where it has weak military and naval footholds on the Levant coast while the US acquires a new war-tested client state.
As geography would have it, those Levant territories are the traditional preserves of the Alawite minority that has ruled all of Syria’s Sunni Muslims for five decades with a steel fist.
Therefore, Russia’s lot is tied to Bashar al Assad and his Alawite loyalists. Putin has jumped into the Syrian cauldron because he wants to ensure that there will always a viable rump state within Syria’s current territory that belongs to Moscow.
Putin does not need Assad except at the moment but he does need grateful Alawites thankful for his protection against whichever kind of Sunnis rule other parts of Syria.
He also knows that unlike America’s Muslim allies in the region, the Alawites are willing to fight, know how to fight and must fight if they are to survive in the post-Assad Levant.
Ideally, the Russia-friendly rump state would include Damascus, Aleppo and Homs since they are vital for internal trade and communication. It could also include Christian and Druze areas since both communities are terrified of the Muslim zealotry of IS and al Qaeda.
Those who reject Islamic rule will see the expanded Russian military bases as guarantors of their safety against the ferocious martyrdom-seeking Sunni Islamists.
Putin wants a small state that depends on Russia for its existence similarly to a Kurdistan’s dependence on Washington. The surest route to creating that dependence is to greatly expand and reinforce Russian military bases in the Alawite territories.
Dislodging them would require a new world war between the US and Russia, which no politician among America’s core European allies would countenance.
There can be many scenarios about how the Middle East could reconfigure if Islamic jihadists, including IS and al Qaeda affiliates are ever destroyed.
For Syria, the credible current outlook is division among the jihadists, Islamic State, Kurds and Assad. Local US-backed Syrian moderates are too weak and lackluster militarily for any real political power to accrue to them.
The Saudis and Gulf Emirates are too fearful of fighting on the ground in Syria to be victors. In any case, Russia’s military presence in Syria has already undermined Saudi political, religious and military influence over territorial changes in the Levant.
Despite its sabre rattling, Riyadh may be forced to make painful compromises. Even more because future US administrations would not find enough support among American voters to continue the so far unconditional political backing given to the undemocratic Saudi princes.
Washington may also find it difficult to convince other countries to back Saudi ambitions. Many around the world believe that a particular strain of Sunni Islam born of Saudi Wahhabi doctrines has spawned Islamic jihadism, especially the Islamic State and al Qaeda. Many also believe that Saudi charities have helped to finance jihadism.
So international sympathy is waning for the use of American weapons and other support to help the Saudis to obtain hegemony in the Middle East, especially if it involves intense sectarian warfare to weaken Shia Islam and destabilize Iran.
Pushing Russian military power out of the Levant will also be very difficult. Many democracies, including Europeans, would reject accepting a US-led war in the Middle East to oust Russia if its purpose is to protect the Saudi regime. There is wide perception – whether deserved or not — that Riyadh has an authoritarian theological regime similar to Tehran.
The outlook in Iraq is for territorial division among the Islamic State, Kurds, Sunni tribal warlords and the Shia rulers backed by Iran. Thus, Iran would have military influence in Iraq through the Shia government in Baghdad, the Alawites in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It may also have military influence through the Houthis in Yemen and political influence through the Shia majority in Bahrain and 20% Shia minority in the oil rich regions of Saudi Arabia.
Russia would have influence through Iran and greatly expanded military presence in Alawite Syria. That would augment its capacities alongside Iran to hinder expansion of American and European influence in Eurasia and Central Asia, which China would also counter.